But at the low-budget, indie end of the spectrum, Bromell, with "Panic," enjoyed an even giddier "Me and Bobby McGee" type of freedom -- the freedom that comes when you have nothing left to lose. Debuting as a feature writer and director with a $2.5 million budget and a cast working for scale out of devotion to his script, Bromell did his job in a spirit of serious yet relaxed invention that netted far more cohesive and poetic results. It's not a diamond in the rough; it's a diamond about a rough.

Sure, the premise of "Panic" resembles that of "The Sopranos," as once again we see a professional killer in midlife crisis (William H. Macy) visiting a shrink (John Ritter). But to borrow from HBO's own ad campaigns for its TV show, think of "Panic" as "The Sopranos" redefined. Bromell wrote his screenplay around the same time that David Chase wrote his pilot for the HBO series, and the film's setup resembles a WASP-y "Sopranos" purged of ethnic and operatic excess.

Macy is heartbreakingly brilliant as the hit man son of a hit man father (Donald Sutherland). He can no longer lie to his wife (Tracey Ullman) or uphold the family business. But when his psychotherapist and an erotically quivering young woman (Neve Campbell) let fresh oxygen into Macy's airtight box, the outcome is an emotional conflagration. "Panic" stays unexpected and involving. It starts out as a single-minded study of Macy's passive-aggressive psychology, but turns electric when it plugs into volatile feelings that rock and roil through the whole ensemble.

Bromell calls Macy "a guy rattling in his cage." What makes the film so full and satisfying (at a swift 88-minute length) is the rest of the cast's ability to convey how that rattle shakes everyone around him.

The outcroppings of Macy's cramped, secret rebellion dent the controlled surfaces of his father and mother (Barbara Bain). They rouse hurt and bewilderment in Macy's bright but in-the-dark wife and piercingly sweet young son (David Dorfman). And they drive him into the arms of Campbell, a messed-up young beauty he meets in his shrink's waiting room. The movie is about how you always hurt the ones you love -- and how, sometimes, you can save them. Watching it, I kept thinking not of "The Sopranos" but of what Arthur Miller might have done if he had updated a family play like "All My Sons" and written in a part for a latter-day Marilyn Monroe.

Bromell is a veteran TV executive producer and writer, best known for his work in both capacities on "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Northern Exposure." He has directed episodes of those shows, but the rules and styles of staging and performance that are set down at the start of a series usually limit a director's choices. "Panic" has a seemingly offhand, steadily intensifying visual elegance unlike anything Bromell has done for television. Where it resembles his TV work is in its appetite for humanity's quirks and unruly contradictions. Bromell is currently a consulting executive producer on the CBS comedy-drama "That's Life," about a 32-year-old New Jersey neighborhood gal who goes to college -- a show that, at its best, has the tart good humor and honesty of an American "Educating Rita."

Bromell began his creative life as a fiction writer (with work published in the New Yorker) and journalist (he wrote essays on film for the Atlantic), and has a new novel due out in May. It derives from Bromell's childhood abroad in the '50s with his CIA father -- and should be even further from "Meet the Parents" than "Panic" is from "Analyze This." Although he's based in Santa Monica, Calif., Bromell wrote "Panic" in Baltimore during his downtime on "Homicide." The film premiered at Sundance a year ago. Artisan Entertainment ("The Blair Witch Project") picked it up, then sold it straight to cable after test-screening it, Bromell says, with Campbell fans, who may have been expecting "Scream 4." Roxie Releasing, which worked wonders with "Red Rock West" and "Freeway," is now bringing "Panic" into theaters. I spoke to Bromell before opening night of its successful run at San Francisco's Roxie in December.

Later, I'll get to my conversation with Zemeckis, who talked about making "Cast Away" with Hanks and some of the great directors he has turned to throughout his career.

Do you feel that this "inner life of the hit man" trend has emerged for any particular reason?

I can't explain it. One of the other perpetrators of it is a guy named David Chase of "The Sopranos," who is a friend of mine, because we did the TV show "I'll Fly Away" together with Sam Waterston. He wrote "The Sopranos" pilot a little earlier than I wrote "Panic," but we didn't know that. I was away in Baltimore and wrote mine and unbeknown to me he wrote his, and when I got back we were just trading stuff to show each other what we'd been writing. I read "The Sopranos" and he read "Panic." And he went, "How can this be?" Then, of course, there were others -- "Analyze This," "Gunshy," "Grosse Pointe Blank" -- all happening independently. So David and I just figured there must be a lot of writers in therapy!

I'm not normally interested in hit men and stuff like that. I was trying to think of a man whose occupation would make him the extreme antithesis to someone who'd usually go into the middle-class, suburban therapy syndrome. Imagining it made me chuckle. Then I described the character to a homicide detective whom we had working for us on "Homicide." And he said, "Oh yeah, that's very realistic. I could take you to three guys just like that." He meant killers who appear to live a normal existence. They have nothing to do with the mob, and they have wives who have no idea what they do -- who think their husbands sell cars or something. So not only was this notion of mine interesting, it was real.

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics