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 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"