Thursday

I hadn't heard anything about The Lookout until I saw it in the cinema listings. I think you'll only find it at two cinemas in London. It's the directorial debut of the writer Scott Frank (Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report, The Interpreter), starring Jeff Daniels and the excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt (star of Brick). Gordon-Levitt is a promising young man whose life falls apart after a car crash - he suffers frontal lobe damage and can no longer function properly. Most significantly, he cannot sequence events. As you can already tell, this film is like a cross between Brick and Memento. He starts to work nights in a bank and soon becomes involved in a plot to rob it. This is, like Memento and Brick, modern, intelligent film noir. The performances are all excellent. It is a little slow in the middle, but picks up brilliantly towards the end. Like Fargo, but without so much of the black humour. It's astonishing this movie hasn't had more publicity. It's much better than, say, Eastern Promises, and a lot of other films out at the moment. Of course, this sort of and greater injustices are happening everyday in the film industry, and I can't do much about it, but at least I can try.