Address Unknown looks and sounds like the canny adaptation of a top-notch short story, the kind of tale you're reading comfortably in bed when the denouement suddenly and unexpectedly makes your jaw drop -- and then, putting your jaw back in action, you exclaim to yourself a deeply satisfied, "Yes."

Well, there's good reason for the short story feel to director Frank Dunlop's sleek production. Kathrine Kressmann Taylor wrote her brief and powerful work in 1938 as an economical one-two punch of an anecdote, had it published in the venerated periodical Story and watched it instantly received by critics as a minor classic. Now Dunlop, absent from New York for some time, has molded it into a [...]