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 … mehrLaura (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 Lovely ) 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 weniger