Brick Critic Reviews

Manages to be visually arresting, packed with geeky allusions to everything from Raymond Chandler to "Blue Velvet."Read the full review

Brick 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.Read the full review

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

The mean streets don't get any nastier than the high school parking lots in this cool-crafted mystery.Read the full review

Johnson has taken a well-worn, much-revised genre, adapted to what's become a clichéd setting and transcended both in the process.Read the full review

A weird and near-perfect polyglot of indie art film and noir mystery.Read the full review

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."Read the full review

"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.Read the full review

The 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.Read the full review