Brick/YMMV

• Alternative Character Interpretation: There are multiple ways to read just about everybody.
• Awesome Music: It's an odd example, but there's something deeply thrilling about Laura's calm, self-assured recitation of "The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze."
• Harsher in Hindsight: The cigarette on the road. Kara's "You better be sure you wanna know what you wanna know." Quite a bit of the movie, in fact.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Laura turns out to be a Femme Fatale Chessmaster that set everything in motion. Although she doesn't win at the end, her plan was both magnificent and clever.
  • The protagonist Brendan is a Magnificent Bastard playing the part of an Ordinary High School Student playing the part of a Hardboiled Detective playing the part of a Magnificent Bastard. Where this cycle begins and ends is an exercise left entirely up to the viewer, but hell if Brendan doesn't keep the wheel turning.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Nine out of ten."
  • The moment when Brendan finally cracks. No subdued weeping or single tears here; full-on, helpless, body-shaking sobbing.
• The Woobie:
  • Even before Emily dies, she's terrified, over her head, and without anyone she really trusts.
  • Dode died believing the girl he loved and protected had been killed by her ex while pregnant with Dode's child, and it turns out the kid probably wasn't his.
  • Brendan is more of a Jerkass Woobie, between his treatment of Emily and Kara, his cruelty to Dode, and leaving the Pin to die, but he gets put through the wringer.