Sleuths.(two motion pictures)

Over the past few months, the theatres have been filled with thrillers, and some of the people making them are eager to escape formula without escaping too far -- that is, not so far that they leave the big audience behind. "Murder by Numbers," with Sandra Bullock, escapes about halfway. The movie is seriously forensic in its approach to crime. A corpse looks like a corpse, and there's much expert patter about the DNA value of vomit and the emotional significance of shallow knife wounds and whatnot. The crime-lab discourse is not all that different from what you might hear in a police-procedural show on TV, but the characters have odd obsessions and histories, and the ...