Alfred Hitchcock explored the theme of murder as an intellectual exercise in Rope as did Richard Fleischer in Compulsion, but this attempt at the same is just plain ropey. Here, Michael Pitt and Ryan Gosling play bored teenagers who kill a defenceless woman simply to get away with it. Of course, their mistake is to underestimate unconventional homicide detective Sandra Bullock, who smells a rat and confronts a few skeletons in her own cupboard to come after them. Bullock plays the maverick detective rather well, but there's little else to get excited about in this dull and predictable thriller.

Tenacious homicide detective Cassie Mayweather and her still-green partner are working a murder case, attempting to profile two malevolently brilliant young men: cold, calculating killers whose dark secrets might explain their crimes.