Post-“Sopranos” audiences almost expect a little neurosis with their movie hit men. “The Matador” obliges with Pierce Brosnan as Julian Noble, international assassin for hire and classic burnout. He looks like the slightly too-worldly type that you might encounter in a hotel bar – precisely how all-American businessman Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear) runs into him in Mexico City.

Their friendship and mutual fascination anchor this surprisingly engaging film. Writer-director Richard Shepard has made no masterpiece, but simply told his story well and with sure-handed focus – a talent in short supply in Hollywood.

“The Matador” feints early on toward the poppy irony and pastels of a “Get Shorty” comedy with its tropical colors and snazzy retro tunes by the Jam. But that feel only reflects hit man Julian’s high self-regard when he’s hot – killing and screwing across the globe – and it soon fades as he does. His tossed-off vulgarities about Bangkok brothels are wacky, and then purposely repeated to the point of embarrassment.

To him, Danny is a welcome ambassador from the normal world (in his case, Denver). Their first encounter at the bar stops short with an astonishing moment: Danny confides about his son’s death years ago, and Julian responds with a dick joke. Danny excuses himself; it’s not that sort of movie. But the next day it is Danny who is depressed, and Julian apologizes and talks him into seeing a bullfight.

This dance of getting-to-know-you and trading fears is what carries the movie, right through that long-anticipated “reveal” of Julian’s profession, confessed in the stands of the bullfighting arena. By now the two are thick as thieves, but “The Matador” always manages to keep even familiar plot turns fresh. In a thrilling sequence Julian walks his unbelieving friend through a hit to prove he does what he says, to the very edge of killing a random quarry in the arena bathrooms.

The film’s second act boldly and shrewdly jumps the action forward six months, after Julian tries and fails to enlist Danny’s help in a murder. Danny touchingly sports the same sleazy mustache as his hero-buddy, and we see more of his loving wife, Bean (Hope Davis), about whom he earlier worried to Julian.

Julian reappears, as he must, with new stories and demands, and the film acquires an unmistakable psychosexual force in Danny’s idolatry, imitation, and fear of his old buddy, that master of death and libido. Their bonds run deep, and the film even leaves the door open to something more having occurred in Mexico.

The cast here turns in smooth performances under the challenge of the shifting tones. Mr. Brosnan, relaxed, is less stunning for the Speedo-and-boots parade than for letting that patrician face crumple up in sobs under the pressure. Mr. Kinnear gets something real for a change out of his prissy-white-bread routine – a boyishness and Midwest-guy decorum perfect for the film’s fraught male friendship.

It’s possible to take the fun out of the film by making it sound a little too serious (and Mr. Shepard himself leans a bit dramatically on Julian’s grandiose matador self-identification). But “The Matador” is a jolt of brisk, compelling competence amid the ambitious thinking-cap and drama-queen exercises of the holiday movie season.

***

Film Forum is verging on documentary overdose again, and adding “My Name Was Sabina Spielrein” to its roster is definitely not the cure for the too-much-doc blues.

Sabina Spielrein was a brilliant Russian-born psychoanalyst, always shortchanged as a footnote to Freud and Jung. Filmmaker Elisabeth Marton tries to restore Spielrein to her deserved stature, but the resulting film is a bore.

Spielrein began as Jung’s hysterical patient. She fell deeply in love with him and assisted him with his work before earning her own degree. She was the first to write extensively on children in psychoanalysis, and made significant contributions to the understanding of schizophrenia.

Ms. Marton draws on extensive archival material, most sensationally a cache of Freud-Spielrein-Jung letters found in 1977. These and others are read at epistolary-novel length, over and around gauzy re-enactments of Sabina in thought or distress, or still photographs. All the repeated symbols and cross fades portend more for academic analysis than living, breathing viewers.

For a film that aims to refocus on Spielrein’s professional accomplishments, Ms. Marton spends an embarrassing amount of time on her subject’s romance with Jung. The occasional monotone male narrator seems an odd choice, too, and only highlights the shortcomings of the dramatizations.