Brick

Loner Brendan's (Gordon-Levitt) ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) has gone missing and because he still feels something for her, Brendan takes it upon himself to find her. With the help of his best friend Brain (O'Leary), Brendan single-mindedly thrusts himself into the various social spheres of the school hoping to find some hints as to where Emily has gone. As all clues lead him to the door of school drug dealer The Pin (Haas), Brendan finds that there is more at stake here than just his life.

River's Edge, released in 1986, documented an overbearing apathy in the hearts of high school kids and was a million miles away from the John Hughes romantic comedies, so popular at the time. Brick, with its opening shot of a teenage girl lying dead in a storm drain, inhabits that same world. Although debut writer-director Rian Johnson places his story in a high school, Brick is more The Big Sleep than The Breakfast Club. Brendan is a mirror of Chandler's private detective Phillip Marlowe but Johnson is not interested in the wise cracks or quips as his Brendan is a fast-talking, no-nonsense rough teenager. Gordon-Levitt - a revelation in this role - is cooler than cool as the outsider in a school of outsiders; his performance would do the noir writers proud as he fully understands what Johnson is trying to do and the genre he is working in. Gordon-Levitt, who must hold the record for the amount of times he gets the head kicked out of him on screen, is backed up an equally impressive cast - especially Haas who, for a man who hardly moves an inch throughout, delivers a performance of quiet malice. If you thought Syriana was a deluge of information travelling at a mile-a-minute, just wait for the snappy dialogue of Brick