What sounds like a stunt, or a genre-mashup oddity like Bugsy Malone, proves to be a sharp, tongue-in-cheek exercise, balancing deadpan menace with well-timed comedy. 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.' full review

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

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. full review

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

Brick is smart -- perhaps too smart for its own good at times. But in the end, its affectations add up to entertainment. full review

Although Brick can be a bit thick, you have to admire the effort. full review

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. full review

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. full review

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. full review

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. full review

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. full review

If Brick isn't totally successful, it does make Johnson a director to watch.

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. full review

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

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

Johnson isn't the first director to subvert suburbia, but he's probably the first to have done such a fine job of it on his first outing. full review