Disturbia [HD DVD]

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Kale (Shia Labeouf), a teenager who recently lost his father in a car accident, is on house arrest after punching his teacher. He soon gets bored with too much time on his hands and starts spying on his sexy new neighbor Ashley (Sarah Roemer). One night, while watching the news on TV, Kale hears about a missing girl and an eyewitness report describing a suspect's car. Kale realizes that his next door neighbor, Mr. Turner (David Morse), has the same vintage car of the same color also with a dent in the bumper. Mr. Turner brings a woman home one night and Kale witnesses some rough play through the open curtains. He begins to suspect him of being the missing girl's killer and starts to spy on him with cameras and binoculars.

Disturbia is directed by D.J. Caruso (The Salton Sea, Taking Lives) and is molded after Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller, Rear Window. I really wasn't expecting too much from this one other than it was a Caruso film, a director whose work I admire. I...

A Star Is Born
What a pleasant surprise! I'm the world's biggest Hitchcock fan, and well past my adolescent years, so I wasn't expecting a lot from a new flick that every critic in America said was "REAR WINDOW with teens." But this film actually works on its own merits, and the chief merit is Shia LaBeouf. I haven't been this impressed with a new talent since I saw Keisha Castle-Hughes in WHALE RIDER, or when I saw 15-year-old Matthew Broderick in the Broadway play, BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS, some 25 years ago. This Shia guy is the real deal, and I have a feeling DISTURBIA will go down in the books as the film that really broke him out to a long, high-profile career.

Older folks, take note: This is not your average "teen thriller," nor is it a simple ripoff of Hitchcock. It is a clever, exciting new entity, expertly directed by D. J. Caruso. And the young lead is a perfect combination of Jimmy Stewart in REAR WINDOW (in the first 75 minutes) and Jodie Foster in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (in the...

Entertaining, Lightly Suspenseful Thriller
"Disturbia" isn't original. It isn't too scary or gory either. What it is, though, is a fun popcorn yarn about a teen named Kale (Shia LeBeouf) who's placed under house arrest for taking out a little internal anguish on a Spanish teacher. His mother (Carrie-Anne Moss) takes away his television, his music and his X-box. What's a bored teen living in suburbia to do to pass the time? Spy on the neighbors, of course. It helps that his newest neighbor, Ashley (Sarah Roemer), is a knockout and takes regularly scheduled swims and rooftop reading breaks. Once he has all of his neighbors' daily lives timed perfectly, he introduces his friend, Ronnie (Aaron Yoo), to his voyeuristic world. The duo gets caught spying on Ashley but she ends up befriending them when they tell her that they believe one particular neighbor, Mr. Turner (the underused David Morse), might be a serial killer from Texas who was never captured.

This sets the film into motion. The three friends try to...

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