British film noir, sufficiently nightmarish and fatalistic and grade-B to merit such classification, and shot in gloomy black-and-white to boot. The storyline, to do with an unemployed would-be writer who makes a practice of "shadowing" anonymous pedestrians for purposes of research, and who one day makes a mistake of shadowing a housebreaker, is chopped up and dished out in nonlinear form, with the hero's changing face functioning as a timepiece: bearded, clean-shaven, badly beaten, partially healed, at various spots around the dial. Nothing thereby is lost, and perhaps something is gained, in suspense and surprise, but the resulting confusion is not enough to cover up the contrivance. Once it all makes sense, it makes very poor sense. Christopher Nolan's feature-length filmmaking debut achieves a nice balance of means and ambition (modest on both scores, more so on the first), and, as a sort of road test, it paves the way to bigger things in the future. Whether or not better. Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw, Lucy Russell. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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