No, Not Ghost Rider.

I missed Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells' rave of Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer last night, but it sure caught me off guard this morning. Polanski's investigative one-man thriller was picked up by Summit a few weeks ago or so in an attempt to cash in on the man's recent headlines, but the consensus is that it's pretty darn good, or in the words of a few, magnificent:

"Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer...is a brilliant and masterful adult thriller. I just saw it this evening, and less than ten minutes after it began I knew I was once again in the hands of perhaps the most exacting filmmaker alive today, as sharp as he's ever been. The film is so gloriously not run-of-the-mill-Hollywood I can barely stand it.

"The same calmly intelligent approach to sory - the sharp dialogue, subtle hints and clues, exacting narrative tissue, patient accumulation of facts and intuitions - that characterized Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown are here in abundance."
-

"The Ghost Writer delivers a kind of heaven that smart moviegoers will flutter over. It has a sense of artified refinement that out Chris Nolan's Chris Nolan."

Of course, it should be noted that Wells is a Polanski apologist through-and-through (even outside the realm of film), but nevertheless, overall response has been greater and friendlier towards The Ghost Writer than to Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. Go figure.