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91A Big Sleep with underage bozos, a Maltese Falcon where the stuff that dreams are made of rests in the lockers of a well-worn high school, Brick is a remarkable oddity, audacious and engaging.
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91Manages to be visually arresting, packed with geeky allusions to everything from Raymond Chandler to "Blue Velvet."
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90With brilliant dialogue out of the 1940s and graceful visuals that add depth to the dark comedy, Johnson debuts with a smart, self-assured feature that portrays adolescence like no other film has.
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88Brick is Bogart goes to high school, in other words, but that thumbnail description doesn't begin to convey the lasting pleasures of Rian Johnson's directorial debut.
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83Johnson also grabs hold of a fundamental truth and seduces us with it: The schoolyard can be the noirest burg of all.
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83It's reminiscent of David Lynch, who is a master at mixing the ghastly and the risible. Brick would be better with a bit more Lynch in its soul, but Johnson is his own man, and I look forward to what he comes up with next.
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The mean streets don't get any nastier than the high school parking lots in this cool-crafted mystery.
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80With a superb lead turn by rising star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rian Johnson’s debut is a smart, original neo-noir that works as an ingenious mindgame as well as a slick Hollywood calling card.
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80Brick doesn't work 100 percent of the time, but it's a striking achievement, beautifully shot, often hilarious and occasionally moving.
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80Johnson has taken a well-worn, much-revised genre, adapted to what's become a clichéd setting and transcended both in the process.
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80All in all, this twerpy little movie is one of the most entertaining pictures to be released so far this year.
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75"Sensational" is the word for Joseph Gordon-Levitt (equally striking in Mysterious Skin), who stars as Brendan, the teen outsider who becomes a budding Bogart.
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75This 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."
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75It's Gordon-Levitt's pitch-perfect work that makes Brick a hardboiled treat.
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A weird and near-perfect polyglot of indie art film and noir mystery.
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75First-time writer-director Rian Johnson's gimmick is that his SoCal teens talk like film-noir yeggs and dames, slinging hard-boiled shade and spitting out terse, rat-a-tat dialogue peppered with slang that was yesterday's news 40 years before they were born. But the result is, against all odds, marvelously entertaining.
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75It takes a good fifteen minutes to fully adjust to the screenplay's rhythms, but once you do, the dialogue is a lot of fun to listen to.
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75Mainly, 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.
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75Brick is kinda brilliant and kinda demented, and you love it for the former far more than you hold the latter against it.
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75The concept is clever and Johnson's brisk editing, dynamic camerawork and snazzy transitions has fun with it all. It makes for an inspired time-warped teenage film noir.
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Writer-director Rian Johnson gives the usual teen angst an entertaining kick. But the joke wears off, and what's left is as convoluted and monotonous as any conventional hard-boiled mystery.
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70Johnson pulls us into his world and keeps things oddly plausible, despite the intense stylization
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70The hair may thin considerably under Brick's hat after a while, and Hammett redone remains Hammett half done, but while the plates are in the air, it's a spectacle of nerve.
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70Like the best noirs, Brick is a triumph of attitude, and there's no arguing that its brand of deadpan cool is precisely unique.
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70The story, while derivative, isn't half bad, and the picture gains in finesse and confidence to the point where Johnson more or less pulls off his peril-fraught exercise.
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70Like a good campfire storyteller, writer-director Rian Johnson knows how to fuse the amusing and the edgy. And, in Brendan, he has created an endearing character.
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70It's worth seeing for the tightly coiled plot, well-realized characters, and novel take on rapacious teen culture.
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67Gordon-Levitt already proved in last year's "Mysterious Skin" his captivating command as a dramatic actor; with Brick he further demonstrates his remarkable dexterity and range.
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63This is neither the noir world of old '40s movies, of which he's clearly fond, nor something new and original enough to fit the concept. Instead, it feels like a blueprint for someone else to figure out.
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63Johnson combines the elements of classic 1940s film noir and "Rebel Without a Cause"-style teen angst in a movie that is as phony as it is ambitious. It's an A+ film school exercise with zero emotional or social impact.
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60Has the inherent limits of all movies that feed on movies, rather than life -- it's original, yet it's not.
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50Challenging to follow, at best.
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50Alas, Brick, from writer-director Rian Johnson, isn't as clever as its conceit.
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50It's all so seamy, sordid, lurid and shocking! And dull, despite a noirish gloss of wide-angle cinematography and a jaundiced, smoggy color scheme.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 46 out of 62
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Mixed: 3 out of 62
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Negative: 13 out of 62
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AndyM.5
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