One of my all time favorites.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Crime reporter Porter Wren (Adrien Brody) is married to doctor Lisa (Jennifer Beals) with two kids. He attends a party thrown by publishing tycoon Hobbs where he is enticed by Caroline Crowley (Yvonne Strahovski). Her dead filmmaker husband Simon (Campbell Scott) was found buried under some rubble. She recruits him into investigating his death while they have a fling. He gets pulled into a search for Simon's lost videos that he often takes secretly.This is trying to be a neo-noir. It has the murder mystery, the femme fatale, and the protagonist narration. It doesn't have all the stylistic markers. The shakey indie style camera moves clash with the needed clean cut neo-noir style. Normally, they play hard with shadows and crisp contrast. Brody is fine as the compromised antagonist. Strahovski has the beauty but her darkness lacks edge. There's not much to the plot. Obviously, the horse story should be much more profound. It should be hinted at every other moment. It should be connected more directly to the present day story. It may help to have her stepfather still involved. Almost everything needs a bit of an upgrade other than Brody.

A different kind of love story. If you want to call this one a love story, because it's obviously more of mystery thriller with a bit of detective work thrown in, almost by accident - which is apt if you think about the breakout case and also the inciting incident. Brody may have been in the Pianist and other movies that can be described to have a higher quality, but he also did one with Argento when he lost his touch.So while this isn't really top notch, it does what it says on the cover. Is that enough for you to watch? Can you feel the temptation and the sparks between the blonde Femme Fatale (you may have seen her prominently in a TV show) and Brody's character? And should he listen to his heart or rather ... I mean Jennifer Beals is waiting at home for him. You can see certain things a mile away, but certain things may just be revealed as the movie flows along. Decent enough

We watched this at home on DVD from our public library. It is an interesting story but things are presented in a way that often makes it hard to grasp exactly what is going on.Set in modern times, 2015 Manhattan, Adrien Brody is Porter Wren, a dying breed of newspaper investigative reporter. As he says in the voice-over today with all the social media that all the younger generation loves a story with pictures goes around so efficiently that once it hits the newsstand in print it is old news.But he did find a lost child and for that he gained a reputation and is sought after to find out what really happened in an 18-month old case of death. The one doing the seeking is the dead man's wife, Yvonne Strahovski as Caroline Crowley. We only see her husband in flashbacks, he is Campbell Scott as filmmaker Simon Crowley. We find that he proposed to Caroline the same night he met her, at a bar, and she accepted. But he turned out to be a really deranged guy. But now she wants to know how he actually died.Wren's wife is a noted surgeon, Jennifer Beals, still looking young in her 50s, as doctor Lisa Wren.We were entertained, it is an interesting story with some interesting twists, but not all of them made a lot of sense.SPOILERS: As it turns out the husband died in her presence. He was playing this dangerous "dare" game in an abandoned building set for demolition the next day. He had her chained to an elevator, threatened to let it pull her down if she didn't answer his questions. She gets the jump and kills him with a stab to the neck but he had swallowed the key to her ankle restraint. So she had to use a bottle opened to cut him open and get the key. All caught on video that Wren discovers. The real reason she hired Wren was to find out who was sending SD cards with damning video to Mr Hobbs, the quirky owner of the newspaper Wren worked for. Her deceased husband had set that up with an innocent woman who got $500 a week just to mail the duplicate SD cards to Mr Hobbs.

This very dark and erotic noir just contained too many incredulous and far-fetched plot elements for my liking. There seemed to be a better movie lurking within this one that never really came together and emerged.Adrien Brody is fine as Porter Wren, the poker-faced investigative reporter and columnist for a daily New York City newspaper. When he's unable to resist the seductive advances of the gorgeous Caroline Crowley, portrayed by Yvonne Strahovski, Porter will find himself being led down a path of dark and demented secrets that will cost him dearly.All in all, this movie, written and directed by Brian DeCubellis, based on a novel by Colin Harrison, had enough intrigue to keep me interested for the most part, but it seemed to fall apart as it progressed, with the filmmaker choosing shock value over plot elements that might have enhanced the story.