O Jogo

Douglas is the right actor for the role. He can play smart, he can play cold, and he can play angry. He is also subtle enough that he never arrives at an emotional plateau before the film does, and never overplays the process of his inner change.

The picture provides Douglas with one of his best roles. If he doesn't quite reach the bizarre heights he achieved in Falling Down, The Game makes its own demands.

The Game is an intensely exciting puzzle-gimmick thriller, the kind of movie that lets you know from the start that it's slyly aware of its own absurdity (which is why it can then get away with it).

Douglas, who delivers a new shade of cruel elegance each time he plays another urbane monster, is the ideal star for this vigorously contrived thriller.

A crowd-pleasing pip most of the way.

It's not for everyone and it doesn't make much sense when you stop to think about it, but it's still a lot more fun than Parcheesi.

The rational side of my brain can pick this movie apart until all that's left is incoherent threads. The movie-mad side, happy to lose control, had a hell of a good time.

This 1997 thriller is fairly entertaining nonsense if all you're looking for is 128 minutes of diversion. But if you'd like something more from David Fincher, the director of Seven, don't get your hopes up.

Regardless of how far one chooses to buy into The Game -- and the ending ambiguously suggests that it could go on and on -- there is no doubt as to Fincher's staggering expertise as a director and his almost clinical sense of precision.

It's like the most hideously overproduced episode of The Twilight Zone on record, complete with a last twist that pretty much reduces what came before to soap bubbles.

Fincher is still working on the assumption that he has better things to do than entertain an audience. Which would be fine if he weren't drawn to such schlocky material.

Sure, it strains credulity, but it's clever, well-paced and builds to a spectacular -- if not altogether satisfying -- conclusion.

This is one of those movies that's so tightly written and densely plotted, it leaves no room for error -- or viewer queries. Unfortunately, the questions will start flying even before the picture's over.

...a top-tier thriller that doesn't always seem to get the respect and admiration it clearly deserves.

"The Game" is a thrilling end run of deception in which a master manipulator is masterfully manipulated.

Engaging '90s thriller has lots of violence, profanity.

A solid original screenplay -- one of the best out of Hollywood this year.