Leading Ladies: December 3, 2004

Heading to the movies this weekend? Find out what's worth your time according to the top women film critics at the nation's best publications. Every Friday morning we'll give you the female perspective on what to expect when the curtain rises.

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Closer
Stars: Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen
Director: Mike Nichols
Rating: R

If this star-studded movie from one of the great romantic comedy directors of our time were billed as an ordinary love-turns-sour modern relationship story, critics might have been kind enough to leave it for dead at the box office. But because they had such high expectations for it, the claws are out instead. Why shouldn't what worked well as a play succeed on the screen? L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor, for one, can't see why anyone dug the play. "At least on the evidence of [Patrick] Marber's screen adaptation, [it] adds up to little more than glib dinner theater for the urban-anomic crowd, who doubtless saw in this narrowly psychological tale of the ruins of modern love something they recognized, and went home happy. Why Nichols would want to make rack of lamb out of this stringy leg of mutton is not immediately clear." Salon's Stephanie Zacharek is particularly pointed when she lays blame at the feet of the director and his writer, who also wrote the play on which the movie is based. "Nichols and Marber seem to think they're serving up the raw goods of modern romance, but they're really just arranging its pickled innards on a pristine, chilly porcelain plate," she writes. USA Today's Claudia Puig is less disappointed, but still finds the movie to be a cold version of modern love, and, in particular, points out, "Male sexual jealousy is a prominent theme that plays itself out in a powerfully cruel scene between Owen and Law."

Female consensus: Head in the other direction