This is a really interesting movie that I thoroughly dug and enjoyed. It's part intense character study, part paranoid suspense-thriller, part chase movie. The setup is this: John Scardino is a police crime & accident scene photog who is emotionally numb inside and moonlights as the lens man for an extortion ring, taking dirty snaps of compromised businessmen in their undies with a saucy hooker named Lorraine in sleazy motel rooms. Suddenly, Scardino starts seeing the blackmail crew from his night job turning up as corpses in his day job in seemingly unrelated homicides. Scardino is the only one who notices the connection, but he can't say squat without revealing his involvement in a criminal enterprise! He rediscovers his emotional inner self by getting major league heebie-jeebies trying to figure out who the killer is. He's taken so many snaps over the years, it could be just about anybody. No one can be trusted! Halfway through, the movie explodes open and turns really grisly and intense--be prepared!

The acting--by Peter Gallagher, Frances McDormand, John Lithgow, Jack Black, Geoffrey Lower, John Kapelos, Charlie Spradling and Lee Arenberg--is great and infinitely diggable. The dialogue is really wry and darkly funny, as is the music. And the movie's look has a kind of Edward Hopper-film noir thing going that I also really dug.

Not a lot of people saw this flick when it first came out. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, then went straight to HBO. Which is weird, because it's so good. This one's a real find. Go forth and dig it!

--Richard Terhune, The Movie Digger

Sometimes when you are rooting around the bargain bin, you can find an overlooked gem. A look at the cast here tells you that it has to be worth something, and with a tile like Skidmarks, there has to be something interesting.

Sure, it is not the best work of these fine performers, but it is certainly worth your time.

Peter Gallagher (Short Cuts, American beauty) plays a police photographer, who moonlights catching people with hookers so his partners can blackmail them. Sort of like Danny DeVito in L. A. Confidential. He hooks up with Frances McDormand (Fargo, North County),an alcoholic who is trying to dry out.

When his partners start dying all around him, you have to believe McDormand is involved as her father is on TV stating that he has never cheated. We know differently, and so does Gallagher. But, that's a red herring, and the killer comes from a place you never suspect.

Jack Black (The School of Rock) provides comic relief as the ex-brother-in-law, and John Lithgow (Terms of Endearment, The World According to Garp) provides the exciting finish. Charlie Spradling provides the eye candy.

I saw this one a good while ago, and it stuck with me as an enjoyable piece of work. Finally, I've been able to track a copy down and last night I sat down and watched it. To not beat around the bush: it was disappointing on the whole, but still worth another watch because of the strange combination of many elements, such as film noir, black humour, drama, romance, an offbeat sounding soundtrack with a lot of Italian ditties and such, and even a portion of gore.

The story sometimes just muddles along like the lost main character himself does, with a finale that does not really deliver a proper payoff. It has to do with the credibility of Johnny forgetting who Skovik is; if you can go along with that, there'll be no problem, but it felt like big step too far for me. Then, there's the dark and romantic drama going on between Johnny and Alice, which didn't work well for me either. Jerry, Johnny's 'former' brother in law, could have been a fun part in itself, but just like a lot of things in this film, it didn't really sit right either. It's hard to put a finger on it, but there you have it.

There's plenty of potential, but with so many different elements going on, I think it takes a really good director to make it all come together just right. This, to me, is more like a 'nice try, no cigar' deal.

5 out of 10, which may even be generous.