The teens in Rian Johnson's striking debut feature Brick express themselves in jargon that sounds as if lifted straight from the pages of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Brick is just an elaborate noir send-up, and an enjoyably kooky one at that

The genre itself is one of my favourites, but I am uninvolved and unmoved by Brick; it's like a teenager dressed in dad's overcoat.

Johnson has mixed together 1940s-style slang and his own jargon to create a lively, imaginative script that keeps the viewer guessing. Hammett would certainly have been pleased...

It's a fun, involving concept, but it tends to weaken the more you think about it.

What's most impressive here isn't the conceit of the premise but the economy of the direction, as when Johnson uses a few simple shots and an off-camera clanging-metal sound effect to cause us to feel the pain of a thug crashing head-first into a pole...

The self-consciously mannered rat-a-tat-tat dialogue also mines a neat overlap between teen slang and noir patois, both of which can be indecipherable to non-initiates.

While Brick is chock-full of the characters, language and imagery of classic noir, it is in fact set among contemporary teenagers. It's a gimmick, but it's a damn fine gimmick.

While it looks to the past for inspiration, Brick is very much a post-modern film of today.

After discovering his girlfriend has been murdered, a high school geek attempts to unravel the mystery in what may be the best teen movie you've ever seen.