Playing the title role of The Machinist is Christian Bale. Or is that Christian Rail? Yuk-yuk; the guy pulled a total reverse De Niro to shed something like 63 pounds to portray the sickly, skin-and-bones Trevor Reznik, the blue-collar worker who loses weight inexplicably and hasn’t slept for a year.
Stranger still, strange Post-it notes pop up around his apartment, like “Who are you?” and a six-letter game of Hangman. He’s a loner at work — even more so after he causes a bloody accident that costs a guy his arm — and the only real companionship he has is literally bought: regular rounds with a sympathetic call girl, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Which begs the question: Does Leigh have some sort of hooker-role punch card? There’s this, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Miami Blues — what does she get when she hits 10? An automatic Oscar? She’s good in this, as virtually always, but it’s Bale’s picture through and through. He’s totally believable as a paranoiac spiraling deeper into an abyss where reality and fantasy blur for him.
Director Brad Anderson seems to channel a good dose of Brian De Palma to drive this obsessive thriller, with Roque Baños serving as his Pino Donaggio/Bernard Herrmann for a score that has viewers on puppet strings. From an epileptic kid to a co-worker who looks Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix, The Machinist keeps you guessing for its whole; even if its twist is a bit of a letdown, all that comes before it is a stylish high. —Rod Lott
Well before the end-of-Bush-era housing market collapse, I had the damnedest time trying to sell a perfectly good home. We had spent thousands of dollars in updates; the neighborhood was safe; and the school district was solid. Took me 16 agonizing months. 
This being based on two Clive Barker stories, all is not well. Writing appears all over the walls of the upstairs bedroom, warning not to “mock us.” Plus, flesh carving (just how rough does it Barker like it, I wonder?) and forbidden sex, in which Ward’s nipples are so erect and pencil-eraser elongated, her partner risks ocular trauma. 
Nice try. With its saturated, slightly washed-out colors, I liked the way Torque looks. I just didn’t like how it sounds, feels, tastes or smells. Every frame is jacked-up and pimped out to resemble a Mountain Dew commercial. Every character lacks peripheral vision and a hearing range beyond two feet so that people and motorcycles can sneak up on them all the time, yet the dudes have no trouble communicating with one another during their loud rides.
It’s not a terrible idea for a film, but director John Woo and company have steered it down that road. Woo’s Asian sensibilities simply do not translate well to American film; his direction is needlessly showy, making for choppy editing, awkward pacing and poor performances. Plus, when he manages — even in a sci-fi thriller — to throw a shot of his beloved white doves, I had to groan.