After his Fight Club, The Game, and Seven, David Fincher's next step is apt to seem a rather modest and old-fashioned thriller: a straightforward damsel-in-distress thing, two damsels to be exact, a well-compensated divorcée with mild claustrophobia and her diabetic daughter, holed up together in an impregnable secret chamber -- a kind of "castle keep" -- in their New York brownstone, besieged by three intruders whose objective happens to lie within the chamber. Weighing against the old-fashionedness are, among other things, the splatter measurements of the violence and the monochromatic artiness of the photography -- all in mossy, moldy, scummy shades of green, as if the action were taking place after-hours in a public aquarium. However, the central situation, in constant danger of petrifaction, is efficiently set up (the arrival of the invaders outside the windows in the rain, in the dark of night, is creepy in the extreme), well sustained, credibly complicated -- in spite of any unhappiness you might feel over the handling of the cops-at-the-front-door -- and ingeniously rearranged on the fly. (The script is by David Koepp, writer as well as director of the underrated Stir of Echoes and The Trigger Effect, and writer only on the exemplary Bad Influence.) Jodie Foster and the boyish Kristen Stewart are both excellent in their clenched and controlled manner: no time, under the circumstances, to explore "character" and "relationship." Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, Dwight Yoakam. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd