Well, I liked "Collateral" a lot.

One way to consider it as a good piece of genre filmmaking with an
excellent sense of "time and place"; this is Jonathan Rosenbaum's
approach in his review at
http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/2004/0804/080604.html

Coincidentally, I recently heard a radio commentary by Ray Pride, who
writes for Chicago's "alternative alternative" weekly, that is, the
Reader's much smaller competitor, "New City," also known as "Newcity,"
in which he ascribed Mann's sense of place to his Chicago origins. Pride
may be on to something there: the grid of this city, where I too live,
and the way it articulates the flatness of the prairie and the adjacent
lake, does convey a more "oriented" spatial sense than either New York
or Los Angeles. Pride also has an interview with Mann at
http://www.newcitycgi.com/cgi-bin/film/film_new.cgi?movie=Collateral&submit=go
, and there Mann describes his films as "story-driven," though he also
calls L. A. a "landscape of dreams."

Anyway, Jonathan is of course right about the film's sense of time and
place, but this isn't what I really liked about it. Nor did I
particularly like the genre film button-pushing: will the killer get to
kill his victims, will he get away annoyed me as methods of holding my
attention. What I liked most was the way certain formal elements
functioned (no surprise here for people who know me; I hope I'm not
starting to sound like a self-parody), particularly the moment-to-moment
sense of imbalance Mann creates in composition and editing. In this
sense, the film reminded me of "Ali," which I also liked a lot, though
its tone is very different. Unbalanced compositions that place
characters on the edge of the frame are answered by differently
unbalanced ones that follow, and the whole film seems to be teetering on
more than one edge. This is entirely appropriate to its story, or
course, and likely enhances one's experience of it, but I think it also
goes beyond that, in that it uses its particular combination of
composition and rhythms to create a way of seeing.

This connects with the other element I liked, the "dreamy" one, made
most explicit in the extremely high helicopter views following moving
cars, but also in the film's lighting, in the choice of bizarre
backgrounds, in one's sense of the characters as "floating" in their
traps for much of the film. It's not a Blake Edwards movie, though,
because Mann's compositions and compositional imbalances are hard-edged
and precise, and he often uses editing beautifully to enhance one's
feeling of displacement.

I see very few new Hollywood movies, but unlike most of the ones I do
see this seems to me to be real cinema, clearly articulated visually in
space and time, rather than images merely illustrating a script, the
"picture-book" mode of many narrative films I dislike. Whether Mann is
greater than I think he is so far (and I'm missing some key ones), or
not as great, I'm not sure, but it's nice to see a film that actually
"works" on my terms, as a film.

Fred Camper