Barbet Schroeder, coming off his engagé political thriller Our Lady of the Assassins, reverts to his Hollywood-hack mode, with an updated Loeb-Leopold case about a precocious, Nietzschean, absinthe-sipping high-school misfit who masterminds a "perfect crime" in collaboration with a cocky BMOC. For hack work, however, it is a handsome job, and authentically cinematic. Very low-key, very attentive to detail, it moves along as smoothly, slowly, stealthily as a Cadillac on semi-inflated tires: no gunning of the engine, no squealing wheelies, no zigging and zagging, no stomach-in-the-mouth ski jumps. The ending perhaps goes over, or near, the top, but not as far over as that of Schroeder's Single White Female or Desperate Measures, and the old-fashioned Hitchcockian "fakeyness" of the rear-screen projection anchors it solidly to the Golden Age. There is, besides, an endless supply of delicate shadowing from the director's trusty cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli (whose absence on the digital-video Our Lady was sorely apparent), and the houseboat residence of the lead detective on the case affords great opportunity for those shadows to flutter and undulate. Sandra Bullock, in the part of the physically as well as psychologically scarred cop, lacks a certain ballast, though she represses most of her worst impulses: her champagne-bubble impulses, her goose-honk impulses, her America's Sweetheart impulses. The plotting, in particular the dovetailing of the heroine's inner demons and outer ones, may be purely mechanical, but the mechanism has been tuned to a fine steady purr. Ben Chaplin, Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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