Phone Booth

This would have been a perfectly good B-movie thriller if it had been 45 minutes long, but it wears a bit thin in its 90-minute run time. In a tremendous acting stretch, Colin Farrell plays a total jerk who uses women and doesn’t care about the consequences of his actions. When Farrell hears a ringing at the phone booth he frequents, he picks it up to hear Kiefer Sutherland, who literally phones in his performance. Sutherland has a gun trained on Farrell, and the rest of the movie takes place in and around the phone booth. Cool premise, amusing dialogue (including the line "You made me hurt my dick hand!") and some nice cinematography don’t quite sustain this film to the end. Still, it’s written by Larry Cohen, the genius behind It’s Alive and It’s Alive 3: Island of the Alive, so it deserves some attention, because when they write the history of 20th-century American cinema, Cohen’s name won’t be mentioned, and that’s a damn shame, since he invented the whole concept of the killer, flesh-eating infant.