Brick: Critic Reviews

Johnson also grabs hold of a fundamental truth and seduces us with it: The schoolyard can be the noirest burg of all.

Rian Johnson's flashy cinematic stunt grafts the hard-boiled argot of Dashiell Hammett onto an upscale Southern California high school.

Bizarre and ingenious neo-noir from US writer-director Rian Johnson.

Even as you struggle to keep up with its speedy chatter and multi-character complexity, Brick is always entertaining.

Brick is almost fiendish in its insistence on finding modern-day parallels to classic pulp-fiction figures.

Brick represents an impossible dream, though: the reuse -- with conviction -- of cinema's most calloused and beloved genre as applied to contemporary middle-class life.

It's an A+ film school exercise with zero emotional or social impact.

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.

Yet in being so unlike the typical high school flick, it captures anew the alienation, the ridiculously earnest intensity of feeling, the insularity of experience that are part and parcel of those blunder years.

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.

All in all, this twerpy little movie is one of the most entertaining pictures to be released so far this year.

This movie leaves me looking forward to the director's next film; we can say of Rian Johnson, as somebody once said about a dame named Brigid O'Shaughnessy, 'You're good. You're very good.'

The mystery feels elementary and his characters, though compelling as sketches, remain one-dimensional from the first to the last good-looking frame.

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.

Alas, Brick, from writer-director Rian Johnson, isn't as clever as its conceit.

It has insolent wit, a taut style and strong characterizations. But it lacks the special quality needed to make a movie spring to life, a divine spark of real imagination.

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.

The unspeakable dialogue is so incomprehensible it seems like a whole new language.

The picture gains in finesse and confidence to the point where Johnson more or less pulls off his peril-fraught exercise.

It's Gordon-Levitt's pitch-perfect work that makes Brick a hardboiled treat.

It is possible to leave Brick without fully appreciating how all the pieces fit together, but still satisfied by a well-crafted tale undertaken by a director who pays homage to a film tradition in a truly original way.

It's a clever gimmick, cleverly wrought, offering further evidence that you can dress up the student body in all manner of garb for all types of genres.