Love-and-money simple

The Square

Crit

Aussie stuntman Nash Edgerton directs a slickly crafted noir--a chunk of Blood Simple, a crucial element of The Player, and as A. O. Scott points out, a whole lot of every film in which someone takes a bag of cash that doesn't belong to him (or her) and things go less smoothly than expected. The film does a brilliant job of keeping you guessing who's done what and why, and how it's all going to shake down for the wicked but sympathetic protagonists. Oh, and it opens with what may be the best sequence of auto eroticism I've ever seen--or, rather, mostly heard, since it's shot at an angle through the car's side windows, and the glass is throwing off early-morning glare. We see almost nothing, but there are those who see--and the reaction shot is priceless.