"Julianne has always wanted a brownstone and is shopping foronenow," Ms.Moore's spokesman, Stephen Huvane, told The Observer . "Their current apartment is very large, and having the second child did not cause them to reconsider a new home because of space."

The apartment was always a bit of a brave step for a starlet: It overlooks an area of the West Village-the meatpacking district-that still smells of animal fat in the summer, even if the well-heeled (or readers of the Times Styles section, at least) continue to eat moules frites at the tables outside Pastis. And there are signs of re-emergence: The Swiss design firm Vitra opened a showroom, and Stella McCartney and Steve McQueen both opened up new boutiques recently.

"Julianne loves her neighborhood, and although she has not yet found a new place, she is still strongly considering the same neighborhood or very nearby," Mr. Huvane said.

Her brokers at Sotheby's International Realty declined to comment.

Ms. Moore and Mr. Freundlich met on the set of The Myth of Fingerprints , which Mr. Freundlich directed and in which Ms. Moore played a starring role. The movie was released in 1997, and their first son, Caleb, was born in December of the same year. In July of 1999, the three settled into an apartment on the second floor of this former warehouse building and paid $900,000 for the privilege.

But when the penthouse, which previously belonged to a couple relocating to Florida, opened up, they decided to buy it for $2.65 million in October 2001. They began a gut renovation on the place thanks to Mr. Freundlich's brother, who coordinated the redesign, and had only just moved into their new place in April of this year when their daughter, Liv Helen, was born. Now they had two places in the building: the original downstairs place and the penthouse. In July, they finally sold the downstairs place for $1.95 million, clearing the way for this sale.

But they needn't have left this apartment to find refuge from the city, said Kathy Matson, an independent broker who sold Ms. Moore the penthouse.

"The whole feeling was romantic and airy, and you don't feel like you're in the city," said Ms. Matson of the renovation. "Just imagine being in your room with a large skylight, and you have a wall of glass doors facing west that open to a planted terrace. It was very special."

Ms. Moore's early investment in the meatpacking district wasn't her only sharp real-estate decision. Real-estate records indicate that she negotiated her broker's fees down to 5 percent. (Most brokers charge 6 percent of the sale price.)

With the holidays approaching and Ms. Moore set to begin filming Without Apparent Motive with Richard Gere in February, time's running short to bag that brownstone. Let the shopping begin!

We Like Fancy: Patinkin Clan Buys $1.68 M. Tribeca 'Wow' Loft

In 1995, Mandy Patinkin invited a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter into his family's modest UpperWestSideapartment and said that his clan had decided against moving into a more lavish place because "we don't like fancy."

A lot can change in seven years, even for a man whose most memorablelineisin1987's The Princess Bride : "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

Mr. Patinkin and his wife, actress and writer Kathryn Grody (who has spun urban pastorals into one-woman shows about raising two sons on the Upper West Side), recently purchased a sprawling three-bedroom duplex loft in Tribeca.

The theatrical duo paid $1,680,500 in mid-July for the 2,820-square-foot condo at a former sugar-processing warehouse on Laight Street, which was converted into 32 luxury condominium units earlier this year.

"You walk in and just go 'Wow!'" the building's on-site developer, the Corcoran Group's Tricia Cole, said of the building's luxe duplexes. "They have very dramatic loft feelings."

Dramatic feelings are nothing new for the star of Sunday in the Park with George , who is still very much in demand: He takes his one-man show, Mandy Patinkin in Concert: Celebrating Sondheim , a tribute to the composer's music, to Henry Miller's Theatre Dec. 2.

Mr. Patinkin and Ms. Grody recently sent their oldest son off to college, but their youngest will likely be accompanying them to their new home south of Canal Street-which means that Ms. Grody may soon be penning maternal memoirs from a new milieu.

The six-room condo has 16-foot ceilings, a wood-burning fireplace, and oversize windows facing north and east.

Neither Mr. Patinkin nor Ms. Grody could be reached for comment, and their broker, Jim Brawders of the Corcoran Group, did not return calls.

upper east side

30 East 65th Street

One-bedroom, one-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $999,000. Selling: $950,000.

Maintenance: $1,800; 44 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: seven weeks.

HOME IMPROVEMENT When the new owner of this 900-plus-square-foot co-op first walked into the place, a prominent architect was already two-thirds of the way through a no-expenses-spared renovation. The apartment's previous owner-a single woman-had hired the architect to design her dream spread, but she had gotten engaged along the way and now needed to find a bigger place to live. But since she had already forked over hefty deposits for all the materials, there was no choice but to complete the redesign. Which was just dandy for the buyer-the chief executive of a public company-because when he first walked in, the apartment was shaping up to be his dream spread, too. "We watched the apartment take shape week after week," said the buyer's broker, Mickey Cohen of Charles H. Greenthal Co. "Can you imagine experiencing the entire renovation and not having to pay for it?" The face-lift included a granite kitchen, custom-made plank wood floors, high-end cabinetry and brass fittings, and niches to hold flat-screen plasma TV's. The bathroom walls were made of a seamless sheet of marble. Every room was wired for sound, and the towel racks were heated. "This was outrageous. I have done dozens of renovations, but I've never seen anything like this," said Mr. Cohen. "If my purchaser had renovated it himself, in a million years he would not have gotten this kind of an apartment." The buyer was so happy with the architect, he hired him to do the apartment's interior decoration, too.

575 Park Avenue (the Beekman)

Two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $725,000. Selling: $655,000.

Maintenance: $3,727; 15 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: two months.

deliver us to beekman place Believe it or not, you can still buy a two-bedroom, 1,400-square-foot Park Avenue co-op in the lower 60's for $655,000. Just ask the new owner of this apartment at 575 Park Avenue. But here's the catch: It's a land-lease building, which means the cooperative is only leasing the building, and the already-high maintenance could spike to stratospheric levels at the landlord's whim. Of course, if you're buying at 575 Park, that's a risk you're probably willing to take: You can't get into the building without having several million dollars' worth of liquid assets in the bank. "It's a fantastic value for anyone who can afford to get in," said the new owner's broker, Irene Simon of the Insignia Douglas Elliman. "It's totally atypical." The Beekman, where Geraldine Ferraro owns an apartment, is one of those old dowager hotels that kept up the five-day-a-week maid service when it went co-op. Many of the units serve as pied-à-terre for out-of-towners-like this apartment, which belonged to two busy professionals who find themselves in Beverly Hills full-time now. They had been subletting their space out to the head counsel of a major corporation for some time before finally giving the place up and selling it to a widower who was downsizing from a grand Fifth Avenue spread. The corner apartment has high ceilings, herringbone-patterned wood floors, and three exposures with river and skyline views.

greenwich village

114 West 13th Street

Four-bedroom, four-bathroom townhouse.

Asking: $2.795 million. Selling: $2.5 million.

Taxes: $13,516.

Time on the market: two years.

EVICTION FRICTION Generally, when selling a townhouse composed of rental units, the seller clears the tenants out before shopping the building around: Why buy into the headache of displacing your tenants? But these buyers-a couple that wanted to make an investment-have had their eye on this building for years. Three of the four tenants left the building without much incident when the seller didn't renew their leases. But the fourth tenant-who had rented the parlor floor for over 20 years-was not as keen on losing his home. "It was a mess," said broker Joseph Dwyer of the Corcoran Group, who worked on the deal with Corcoran brokers Sara Gelbard and Meredith Hatfield. "He dragged things out as long as he could." Two years and one court-ordered eviction later, the way for the sale was clear-and the same buyers who had been around all along were still willing to ante up. Two and a half million dollars is nearly a steal when it comes to Greenwich Village townhouses these days, but it wasn't the tenant trouble that got these buyers their price: The building needs a gut renovation before it can be used as a single-family house. The couple plans to invest over a million dollars in the project. "They knew they could do something for the house," Mr. Dwyer said.

sutton place

16 Sutton Place

Two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $995,000. Selling: $950,000.

Maintenance: $1,856; 62 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: One-year.

incommodious A retired widow who was downsizing from a stately prewar Park Avenue apartment fell in love with everything about this postwar Sutton Place co-op-except the toilet. "It was an odd maroon commode, with a very unusual cylindrical back," said the buyer's broker, Eileen Mintz, a senior vice president at Insignia Douglas Elliman. "That's the one thing she knew she would have to replace." Credit for the flamboyant loo goes to the apartment's previous owner, an antiques dealer from Monte Carlo, who was using the apartment as a pied-à-terre . Notably, the antiques dealer had added archways and moldings to give the apartment a prewar feel, and the spread overlooked both the river and rows of townhouses across the street. "It really had the charm she was looking for," said Ms. Mintz. "It reminded her of a smaller version of the one she was coming from.

Quite the contrary. As an academic and a Francophile, I completely identified with the film's often farcical and yet subtle relationships between young men and women on the same cultural level. Consequently, I was never bored. Still, I think the film has problems besides its length with its targeted art-house audience. For starters, the title is foolishly misleading. There is some sex, of course, but the movie is hardly drenched with it. Nor are the women ever treated as bimbos and brainless sex objects. If anything, they are stronger and more perceptive than the men. Yet, the silly title implies a male narcissistic obsession about getting laid, which is not the central issue at stake.

Another problem is that the film is more novelistic than dramatic, never quite reaching a climax, but spreading its insights around several characters and shifting its point of view with impunity. Since most of the academics are involved with one branch of philosophy or another, there is a natural tendency to theorize endlessly rather than act abruptly or even instinctively. The mind plays games with the senses, and no one is ever quite sure what anything means exactly.

What is fresh and original about the film is its profound respect for academic achievement despite the familiar absurdities of academic careerism. In England and America particularly, novelists, dramatists and filmmakers cannot look at university life with a straight face, particularly when the faculty is the center of attention. I laugh as loudly as anyone at novelist David Lodge's satiric thrusts at my undeniably pompous profession, but I am glad nonetheless that there is at least one young French filmmaker treating the subject seriously, though not with undue solemnity.

Paul (Mathieu Amalric) is introduced to us as a 29-year-old assistant professor of philosophy at a university in Paris. Paul never wanted to be a teacher, aspiring instead to a career in writing. He therefore has been blocked by his own indecision from completing the doctoral thesis that would make him a full professor. In the course of the film, we are given to understand that he is fully capable of writing the thesis, and, in so doing, making a distinguished contribution to his field of study. In Hawksian terms, he is good enough to deliver the goods. This in itself marks a welcome change from the anti-elitist conventions of the genre.

Paul's love life is something else again. He has been involved with Esther, a translator, for 10 years, but he has wanted to terminate the relationship almost as long. Meanwhile, he has had a brief affair with his best friend's girlfriend, Sylvia (Marianne Denicourt), but his conscience wouldn't let him continue the betrayal. This is merely the beginning of a series of adventures in elective affinities swirling around a score of psyches, each with a distinctive approach to the problem of existence in a post-existential world.

The final problem facing My Sex Life at the American box office is the lack of any journalistic catch phrase like "New Wave" to give a cachet to a new generation of filmmakers, among them Mr. Desplechin, who deserves the kind of acclaim granted in the past to Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and the other luminaries of Cahiers du Cinéma and the Nouvelle Vague . Mr. Amalric bears a slight resemblance to Christian Slater, but in a role Hollywood would never consider suitable for Mr. Slater or anyone else. The lack of familiar names in the cast of My Sex Life does not indicate a lack of dazzling talent. The film is running at the Walter Reade Theater Sept. 17-26. It may be your last chance to see it.

Going Nowhere

Mark Pellington's Going All the Way , from a screenplay by Dan Wakefield, based on his novel, reminds me in its title (and I seem to be obsessed by titles this week) of a line in Lanford Wilson's 1970's pre-AIDS play, The Fifth of July , in which Swoosie Kurtz, while taking a sunbath on the stage, suddenly blurts out: "What ever happened to going all the way?" The audience roared with laughter at this smug reference to the sexually fearful 50's, so outmoded by the sexually adventurous 60's and 70's. I never read Dan Wakefield's 1970 novel, which was described by the film's director, Mr. Pellington, as "the seminal piece of literature that influenced me-my Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace ."

The story is set in the summer of 1954, and is centered on two returning Korean War veterans. The boys, both from Indianapolis, are hardly old friends though they went to high school together, nor army buddies since one stayed stateside while the other went overseas. Shy, introverted, class nerd Sonny Burns (Jeremy Davies) and brash, extroverted superjock Gunner Casselman (Ben Affleck) actually meet on the train home, with Casselman taking the initiative in the reunion because of his newfound interest in photography, which had been Sonny's area of expertise in high school and ever since.

At home, Sonny takes every opportunity to escape from his oppressively conformist parents, and particularly his busybody mother, Alma Burns (Jill Clayburgh). Talk about monsters. Ms. Clayburgh is given the distorted camera treatment to make her look unbearably invasive and inane. Indeed, Mr. Pellington and Mr. Wakefield seem to have an aversion to mothers in general, since Gunner's mother Nina (Lesley Ann Warren) is presented as a sluttish anti-Semite of the most virulent kind. To see two talented actresses such as Ms. Clayburgh and Ms. Warren reduced to period caricatures for the sake of a sub-Salinger male rite of passage through the provincial labyrinth of Indianapolis serves to prejudice me against the two buddies.

One is not surprised, therefore, to see Sonny dump his longtime girlfriend Buddy Porter (Amy Locane) even though she is infinitely more attractive than the supposedly more desirable sirens Sonny and Gunner gush over during their curious bonding. In the end, Sonny can find salvation only by following Gunner to New York, where it was all at in 1954. By a strange coincidence, I got out of the Army in 1954, and New York was my hometown, and I had no idea where anything was at, though I must confess that even in my darkest days, I was never tempted to try my luck in Indianapolis. There is a there here in New York. I wish I could say the same for Going All the Way .

The Myth of Sundance, No Explanation Needed

Bart Freundlich's The Myth of Fingerprints has received excellent word of mouth since its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. I was particularly looking forward to seeing Hope Davis in a role reportedly different from that in The Daytrippers earlier this year. She turned out to be proficient again, but in a less satisfying dramatic context than that of Daytrippers . In fact, the whole cast is impressive in this depiction of a messy New England Thanksgiving family reunion in which people complain and don't explain. Ms. Davis, Noah Wyle, Julianne Moore, Blythe Danner, Roy Scheider, Michael Vartan, Laurel Holloman, Arija Bareikis, Brian Kerwin and James Le Gros are as good an ensemble as you can find on the far side of Sundance and beyond.

Perhaps the actors were so good that writer-director Bart Freundlich didn't think he had to write any clarifying or deepening dialogue to suggest the origins of their malaise. The actors went along with the idea that, like Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), they could express any emotion with just their eyes. What are words, after all, but superfluities in the presence of histrionic genius. Mr. Freundlich does have a way with actors, and actors have their way with him. The next time I hope he thinks of little me sitting in the audience without a clue as to why everyone is looking so disgustedly at everyone else.

That Guy Gives Good Gal

If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives a special award next year to best performance by a male actor playing a transsexual, the winner has to be Steven Mackintosh as the luminously dignified Kim Foyle in Richard Spence's Different for Girls , from a screenplay by Tony Marchant. Rupert Graves as the "straight" lover is not bad, either. Nor is the film.