The Two Faces of January

While this cool, crisp thriller may not have the complexity and polish of Anthony Minghella’s film, it does have a lean, urgent economy of storytelling that makes for a watchable yarn.

[Hossein Amini's] polished storytelling carries this along, generally compensating for the mundane visuals and the actors' skilled but unmoored performances.

At a certain point, it's akin to reading a mediocre murder mystery. You finish it because you're too far in to quit, as opposed to actually caring how things wrap up.

What the movie lacks in suspense, it could make up for with erotic tension. That's missing, too.

Everything about The Two Faces of January is right, even as the events it describes - a couple's idyllic Grecian holiday, a charming American's adventures abroad - go terribly wrong.

The movie never reaches a boil. Instead, it simmers and simmers until you're suddenly shocked at the hot water you're in.

A welcome throwback to Americans-in-European-peril classics like Charade and The Third Man, The Two Faces of January is a taut, tense and tricksy thriller worthy of your attention.

An intelligent and efficient thriller.

Well paced with the charms of a Hitchcock thriller.

Amini has gone to the trouble to set the work in 1962 or so ... but his work tells us next to nothing about the period and next to nothing about Highsmith's attitude toward the times and the society.