The lower middle class beach resort of Brighton, a British Asbury Park with boardwalks and arcades, provides an intriguing backdrop to <em>Brighton Rock</em>. Director Rowan Joffe\'s debut (out on DVD) places Graham Greene\'s novel in a <em>Quadrophenia</em> setting of mods and rockers rumbling on the beach in the mid-\'60s. The period accoutrements are cool, but Joffe hasn\'t stinted on constructing a tightly wound neo-noir around one of Greene\'s tricky morality tales about betrayal and vengeance, the coldness of evil, the abuse of innocence and the problematic nature of what we call love. Helen Mirren is outstanding as the shopkeeper on a mission of redemption and revenge. Sam Riley stars as Pinkie, the mod mobster who flinches at almost nothing to control a small strip of boardwalk, and Andrea Riseborough plays Rose, a young girl who never had a chance to bloom.
