Garfield, who also wrote the novel that inspired "Death Sentence," said that he had long since moved on to other kinds of material, but that he understood why audiences today might be ready for a new wave of cathartic, rough justice at the movies. "People are just sort of simmering with the kind of anger that they can't really define, and this kind of movie gives them some kind of release," he said.

He recalled that when he saw "Death Wish" for the first time, in 1974, it was a late-afternoon matinee near Times Square, but the theater was packed, "and people were getting up on their seats and yelling, 'Yeah, kill him!"'

Back then, of course, both the avenging gunfire and the social commentary — in blatant exploitations like "The Exterminator," more mainstream action movies like the Dirty Harry sequel "Magnum Force" and gritty classics like "Taxi Driver" — were aimed at the lawlessness of cities like New York.

Now, with murder rates down and cities habitable again, both the on-screen violence and the sociopolitical references are as likely to be about the war in Iraq or the more generalized insecurity of a world on guard against terrorism.

"The Brave One," for example, echoes the revenge-speak of political leaders who vow to "waste the bad guys" and use taunts like "bring 'em on," and it lets a soul-searching character ask, "Hasn't the whole Iraqi debacle taught us anything?" This movie acknowledges that New York has become "the safest big city in the world" while making clear that plummeting crime rates provide little comfort to those who become the statistical anomalies.

Foster's character feels so secure in present-day Manhattan that she sees no danger in strolling, well past sunset, through the kind of pedestrian underpass in Central Park that two decades ago would have loomed as frightening to moviegoers as the Bates Motel. The brutal attack she barely survives, said the film's director, Jordan, is a reminder that in this age even a pristine city can be just one senseless act away from utter chaos.

"The reason I wanted to do it was because of the kind of nameless fears people in Western society have at the moment," Jordan said in a phone interview from Dublin. "If I was tapping into anything, I was tapping into that. I see a lot of films attempting to deal with the political situation — the Iraq war, or the post-9/11 sensibility — in terms of ways dealt with in the 1970s. And to me the paradigm doesn't work. And I think it's because people at the moment in the West are afraid of the very structure of their society falling to pieces. They're afraid, and they don't know why."