Brick

• Condition: New
• Format: DVD
• AC-3; Color; Dolby; DVD; Subtitled; Widescreen; NTSC

The hit suspense thriller based on the best-selling novel by Nora Roberts stars Emilie de Ravin (TV's Lost) as Lieutenant Phoebe MacNamara, an expert hostage negotiator juggling a high-pressure career while caring for both her young daughter and her mother (Cybill Shepherd, TV's The L Word). When Phoebe meets handsome bar owner Duncan Swift (Ivan Sergei, TV's Jack & Jill), no amount of negotiation will allow her to resist his charms. Phoebe is assaulted by an unknown assailant, and later receives a series of mysterious threats. Suddenly Phoebe's the target of a psychopathic killer out to destroy her personally and professionally.Brendan Frye is a loner, someone who knows all the angles but has chosen to stay on the outside. When the girl he loves turns up dead, he is determined! to find the "who" and "why" and plunges into the dark and dangerous social strata of rich girl Laura, intimidating Tug, drug-addled Dode, seductive Kara, and the ominous Pin. But who can he really trust? These are the ingredients of Brick, a gritty and provocative thriller that critics describe as "a clever, twist-filled whodunit!" (Claudia Puig, USA Today) High school collides with hard-boiled film noir in the twisty, cunning Brick. When he gets a mysterious message from his ex-girlfriend, a high school loner named Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mysterious Skin) starts to dig into a crisscrossed web of drugs and duplicity, eventually getting entwined in the criminal doings of a teenage crime lord known as the Pin (Lukas Haas), his thuggish henchman Tugger (Noah Fleiss, Joe the King), and a mysterious girl named Laura (Nora Zehetner, Fifty Pills). Brick has not only the seductive, labyrinthine plot of a crime thriller by Dashiell Hammett ! (The Maltese Falcon) or Raymond Chandler (Farewell, ! My Lovel y) but also a dense high-school version of hard-boiled lingo that's both comic and poetic. The movie unfolds with headlong momentum as Brendan manipulates, fights, and staggers his way through layers of high-school society. Gordon-Levitt is excellent; between this and the equally compelling Mysterious Skin, he's left his 3rd Rock from the Sun days behind. Also featuring Meagan Good (Waist Deep) and Richard Roundtree (Shaft). --Bret Fetzer