Brick.

Kristi Mitsuda: "Maybe it says more about the state of American cinema than my own viewing habits, but I can't remember the last time I saw a movie as purely and perfectly entertaining as Rian Johnson's Sundance prize-winning debut feature, Brick." James Crawford agrees somewhat; Nicholas Rapold not at all. Another round at indieWIRE from Reverse Shot.

Michael Atkinson in the Voice: "Hammett redone remains Hammett half done, but while the plates are in the air, it's a spectacle of nerve."

Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly: "[W]hat makes the film more than a mere act of homage (unlike Wim Wenders's misbegotten Hammett) is how Johnson finds in the world of noir - with its brutes and bombshells, confidences traded on scraps of notepaper and allegiances that shift on a dime - a ready metaphor for high-school life as it feels from the inside, rather than how we usually see it in movies, which is to say filtered back through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia."

Scott Tobias for the AV Club: "It's one of those films that needs to be seen several times to sort out all the intricacies of speech and plotting, but it makes that prospect inviting."

Updated through 4/7.

Armond White: "She's the Man may be hokey, but Brick is asinine." Also in the New York Press, Jennifer Merin talks with Johnson; so, too, do Salon's Andrew O'Hehir and, for Suicide Girls, Daniel Robert Epstein.

Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Reminders: Ed Gonzalez at Slant, Sarah Hughes in the Observer and Charles McGrath in the New York Times and, talking to Johnson for MovieMaker, Lily Percy.

Updates, 3/31: Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "There is something cute, if not outright ludicrous, in the spectacle of dewy young actors striking the poses of hard-boiled demimondaines and desperadoes and failing utterly to make them come alive."

Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "It's rare to see a debut as witty and assured as this."

Steve Erickson at Gay City News: "You'd be better off renting either The Big Sleep or Fast Times At Ridgemont Highthan going to see this half-hearted mash-up."

Updates, 4/1: Cinematical's James Rocchi: "[T]his is Johnson's film, and it's one of the most accomplished writing-directing debuts in recent memory."

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "What's remarkable about Brick, and what makes it so hugely enjoyable, is that in creating the film's weird world, Johnson has managed to free it from the chokehold of irony."

The Reeler: "[I]f Brick evolves as the cult stand-by I think it will become, we are basically talking about destabilizing myths for an entire generation. Does it confuse? Occasionally. Does it explain? Sort of. Does it apologize? Fuck no."

Jürgen Fauth: "[S]uddenly you realize that this stylized world isn't what being a teenager was like at all - but it's what it felt like."

Update, 4/5: Daniel Kasman: "The deaths and the pain and the kids do not really matter, in the beginning or in the end, and Brick ends up weightless."

Update, 4/7: Jason Guerrasio talks with Johnson for Filmmaker.

Posted by dwhudson at March 30, 2006 1:51 PM