Buried (2010) review

Nasty little film earns Hitchcockian bonus points for keeping to a simple setup and never breaking from it: keep a contract truck driver (Ryan Reynolds) - who was kidnapped in war-torn Iraq - buried alive in a coffin with only a handful of items (a cell phone, a lighter, a knife, a flashlight). Reynolds does wonders trapped inside the box - I often wondered about his emotional range - but it is, still, a technical picture with sociopolitical underpinnings instead of the other way around: debate about the U.S. presence in the Middle East is secondary to Cortés and his cinematographer coming up with new ways of spinning the camera around. The ending is grim (and, to some viewers, unfair) but it does suggest that Reynolds' character, despite being a family man who just "signed a contract" and never carried a weapon or wounded anyone, is still "guilty."