Ryan Johnson’s Brick blends Dashiell Hammett’s verbal style with hard-boiled noir mystery to glorious ends in this Southern Californian high school murder case.

We find Brendan Frye, our chosen outsider, unpicking the details that lead up to his ex-girlfriend, Emily, vanishing.

A host of high school cliches- the jock, the geek, the bully, the drug dealer, are re-cast through a noir lense into king pins, socialites and heavies. It’s only when Brendan is finally able to gain access to the The Pin’s inner circle of criminals that he's able to uncover the truth of Emily’s whereabouts.

Exquisitely played, bringing the high school melodrama into a hard-boiled detective mystery, Brick provides a brilliant script for Joseph Gordon Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Noah Fleiss and Meagan Good.