Mamet’s third film as a director is one of his strangest and most compelling. Although it starts off quite conventionally as a police thriller, it gradually and then aggressively morphs into a psychodrama about a police detective’s identity crisis, which leads him into a dark netherworld of secret organizations and covert violence that could very well be simply ridiculous if it didn’t have such a gripping dreamlike quality and wasn’t anchored by Joe Mantegna’s powerful central performance. (DVD)