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It's great to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin) in the juicy role of a high-school gumshoe on the trail of his estranged girlfriend's killers.
Alas, Brick, from writer-director Rian Johnson, isn't as clever as its conceit.
Brick is smart -- perhaps too smart for its own good at times. But in the end, its affectations add up to entertainment.
Although Brick can be a bit thick, you have to admire the effort.
Brick drops down like a frenzied teen fever dream of criminal patter and hairpin plot turns. A word to the wise: Pay attention, or you'll feel a lot less wise.
There's no denying that Brick is weirdly expressive, often when it seems most artificial. What begins as the most gimmicky sort of genre retread somehow evolves into that most elusive of films: a personal statement.
Noir fits "Brick" like a glove, stylishly injecting assured tough talk, vice-grip tension, black humor, striking sound design and gunshots sounding like locker doors slammed on options. A great detective story and, for some, a high-school flashback.
The movie's rigorous dark-lined elegance leaves a punchy aftertaste
That rarest of things: a movie called 'unique' that actually is.
This glorified student film is only barely elevated by the talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan Frye a noir-speaking California high school misfit caught in the violent middle of a drug gang responsible for the death of his ex-girlfriend (Emilie de Ra
Brick is a black-comic ballet through the peculiar terrors of suburban adolescence...
Whatever it is, wherever it is, whenever it is, it's not remotely like anything else out there.
Brick exemplifies the difference between a cinematic talent show and mere karaoke.
the school's cliques, cants and "class" politics are shown to be as amoral and impenetrable as any criminal netherworld dreamt up by Raymond Chandler.
An innovative ride that carries the viewer into a world familiar from genre films and the novels of Dashiell Hammett, yet quite unlike anything we've seen before.
A refreshing private-eye thriller in a style now widely identified as neo-noi.
A good whodunit with some references to films made in the 1940s.
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