By launching his narrative with this jolt of weirdness, Mr. Steers seems to be warning his audience not to make any easy assumptions about his tale of a Holden Caulfield–like preppy on the loose in New York with his mother's credit card, having been kicked out of every private school in the East and, most recently, having escaped from a military school in the Midwest. The writer-director's warning is fulfilled with dialogue that is often witty but never funny-that is, except for one campy, out-of-context joke delivered at the expense of a drag queen inserted into the proceedings to spice up a dull stretch in the film.

The best thing about Igby in comparison with his too faux-naïf predecessors is his ease with intelligent women, such as Claire Danes' Bennington girl Sookie Sapperstein, who doesn't mind Igby's calling her a nymphomaniac but deeply resents being referred to as a "J.A.P." Amanda Peet's Rachel comes closer than Sookie to being a real nympho, but one with a strange kind of pseudo-artist's dedication to achieving a lifestyle that keeps drifting out of her reach. Though Sookie "betrays" Igby with his older and more financially promising brother, and though Rachel casually "betrays" her married lover, real-estate tycoon D.H. (Jeff Goldblum), with Igby, it's no big deal in either instance.

For an American filmmaker, Mr. Steers is remarkably cool about sex, neither avoiding it altogether (as is the mainstream custom these days) nor getting hysterical when it happens. There are always decisions to be made, and lives to be lived, after the sex, even though all the family machinery has broken down and is beyond repair. Igby's father, Jason (Bill Pullman), has ended up in an insane asylum, but Igby loves him desperately, even after he's told that Jason is not his real father. This is just another complication in his troubled existence that he must handle. And as much as Igby wages an endless war against his unloving mother and his calmly cynical brother, in the end he comes to realize, without any false sentiment, that Mimi and Oliver will always be part of him.

Igby Goes Down is, ultimately, the kind of film in which everyone's point of view is respected, as in Jean Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (1939)-and yet everyone, including Igby, remains something of a mystery. Nobody wins, and nobody loses. This is one grown-up movie.

Anguished Motherhood

Claude Miller's Alias Betty , from his own screenplay, based on the novel The Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell, seems to delight in its congested narrative, in which the intersecting fates of nine characters are determined by the feelings aroused by two small children. The accidental timing of this release provides an eerie echo of a subject-the kidnapping of small children-that has been everywhere recently in the Amber Alert–crazed media, and it also addresses the mistreatment of small children by abusive mothers.

Françoise, who goes by the pen name Betty (Sandrine Kiberlain), is a young divorced mother who wrote a sensational best-seller while she was living in New York. She has returned to Paris with her young son, Joseph (Arthur Setbon), with whom she plans to live quietly in an outer suburb. She is divorced from Edouard (Stéphane Freiss), a struggling academic writer who resents her success.

We have already learned from an early, expressionist childhood scene that her mentally disturbed mother, Margot (Nicole Garcia), mutilated Betty's hand in a fit of anger. Indeed, the grown-up Betty is introduced to us at the airport through a time-spanning close-up of the scar on her hand. Hence, Betty shows surprise and disbelief when Margot greets her at the airport. Despite Margot's overtures, Betty still hasn't forgiven her mother for having hurt her physically and emotionally throughout her troubled childhood.

After their return, Joseph wakes up from his afternoon nap one day to find himself in picturesque proximity to a little bird on the window sill. Joseph falls to his death trying to reach it.

After her son dies, Betty suffers a nervous breakdown and is hospitalized, while Margot carries out all the funeral arrangements without informing anyone in or out of the family of Joseph's death. When Betty returns home in a dispirited state, the still unstable Margot decides to find a replacement son for her. Driving around the poorer inner suburbs of Paris, Margot snatches the unattended José (Alexis Chatrian), who slightly resembles Betty's dead Joseph.

José's unwed mother, Carole (Mathilde Seigner), has already been demeaned as something of a tavern wench, given to making flirtatious advances on men with shady reputations. Carole lives with François (Luc Mervil), a decent French laborer of African descent, who disapproves of her free and easy ways and her neglect of José, whom he often cares for while Carole is working and he is temporarily unemployed. Yet when José is kidnapped, the racist police descend upon François as the prime suspect.

For his part, François suspects one of Carole's old lovers, Alex (Edouard Baer), who is currently married to a rich older woman who has left him alone in the house without any money while she's off on a solo vacation. Alex, who forges passports as a sideline, hits upon a scam to "sell" his wife's house without her permission, pocket the cash and flee abroad on a false passport.

The plot thickens when Betty discovers bruises on José's body and resolves to keep the child away from his abusive mother. Margot is overjoyed by Betty's change of heart, but Betty keeps an emotional distance from her mother. At this point, Betty's ex-husband Edouard reappears and assumes that José is his own son, since Margot never informed him of Joseph's death. Edouard proposes, to Betty's horror, that they be reconciled to give their son a real father.

When Edouard discovers that "Joseph" is actually the kidnapped child José, he hits upon a scheme: He will pay Carole for consenting to Betty's adoption of José, in return for which Betty will come back to him with the child in tow. But Betty doesn't wait for the end result of Edouard's maneuvers; despite a promising romance with the doctor who cared for her in the hospital, she resolves to flee abroad with José, leaving everything and everyone behind.

But the tangled web of other people's feelings ensnares two of the characters in fatal consequences, traps another in a misguided police chase through an airport, and releases Betty and José to their journey of mutual redemption. The film thus achieves an audience-satisfying closure, after a fashion. In some respects, Mr. Miller's opus may seem too facile for some tastes. Still, Ms. Khiberlain, Ms. Garcia and Ms. Seigner brilliantly play the three mothers like a dissonant string trio on a single theme: the varied agonies of motherhood.

As more than a footnote, the current golden age of child actors continues with the performances of Masters Chatrian (José) and Setbon (Joseph). Still, I remain suspicious of redemptive motherhood as a rebuke to "extreme" feminism, and of the treatment with kid gloves of the film's token African character. It is all too easy.

Summer Love

Robert J. Siegel's Swimming , from a screenplay by Lisa Bazadona, Mr. Siegel and Grace Woodard, takes place on the fringes of the eternal town-versus-gown turmoil, pitting local yokels itching for a fight against spoiled college kids looking for an easy score. In Myrtle Beach, S.C., Lauren Ambrose's Carson McCullers–esque Frankie Wheeler, with her sexually ambiguous name, waits tables in her family's greasy-spoon establishment on the boardwalk. Frankie's closest friend is Nicola Jenrette (Jennifer Dundas Lowe), who operates a body-piercing parlor next-door. The party-loving Nicola keeps dragging the more serious-minded Frankie to ever wilder college gatherings.

When the high-spirited and glamorous Josée (Joelle Carter) bursts on the scene looking for a summer job, Frankie is immediately attracted to the stranger, and Nicola is immediately jealous. As Josée begins manipulating the shyly susceptible Frankie with her attentions. Nicola steps up her insults to the imperturbable Josée, forcing the reluctant Frankie to chose between her two friends.

The lesbian tendencies in the characters are subtle and restrained almost to the vanishing point. When Frankie finds herself attracted to a slow-speaking drifter named Heath (Jamie Harrold), who sells tie dyes out of his car, she is quickly abandoned by Josée without being reconciled with Nicola. Frankie is on her own at last, and she finds new strength in breaking away from her dependence on these old, vacuous girlfriends.

The film is an earnest try at beachcombing verismo , but it would be even more indistinct than it is were it not for the striking, quietly vulnerable personality of Ms. Ambrose, who is one of several acting stand-outs in HBO's Six Feet Under .

Bogdanovich Live

From Sept. 11 through Sept. 17, the Pioneer Theater (at 155 East Third Street, corner of Avenue A; 212-254-3300) is reviving Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show , from the novel and screenplay by Larry McMurtry, with a new 35-millimeter black-and-white print. Mr. Bogdanovich will appear in person on Sept. 13 for a Q&A on his dusty 1971 celebration of old values both on and off the screen.

A Wyler Retrospective

Film Forum 2 is presenting an unusually exhaustive retrospective of the films of William Wyler (1902-1981) from Sept. 13 to Oct. 10. This is a collaborative labor of love for Bruce Goldstein of Film Forum and Wyler's devoted daughter, Catherine Wyler, who was named after Merle Oberon's Cathy in the director's Wuthering Heights (1939), which opens the series along with The Little Foxes (1941), in which Wyler collaborated with Gregg Toland on several deep-focus effects that prompted French film aesthetician André Bazin (1918-1958) to proclaim " Vive Wyler à bas Ford! " I still don't agree, but I'm prepared to concede that in my extreme contrarian period in the early 60's, I gave much shorter shrift to Wyler than he deserved in The American Cinema . Still, I do like The Letter (1940), Dodsworth (1936), The Collector (1965), The Good Fairy (1935), Jezebel (1938) and Counsellor-at-Law (1933) enormously, so he must have been doing something right. And let's not forget Roman Holiday (1953), Friendly Persuasion (1956) and Detective Story (1951). It's time for a new generation to discover the glories of the old, classical Hollywood cinema through the works of one of its most honored artists.

Considering the deplorable way things are going at the movies in general, and the dearth of roles for mature women in particular, a boy like moi is lucky to catch even one of his favorite actresses above the title of anything on the screen today. Imagine my joy to find two of them together at the same time! Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon are an inspired dream team in a riot called The Banger Sisters . They are riper, looser and dreamier than ever.

To lure these A-list glitter-moths back to the cinematic flame, you'd need a challenging and totally original idea, and Vancouver writer-director Bob Dolman has come up with a honey. In the days of rock 'n' roll groupies, a pair of crazy, carefree gal pals named Suzette (Ms. Hawn) and Vinnie (Ms. Sarandon) were the queens of the good-time girls-two stage-door sluts who screwed every stoned freak with an electric guitar between his legs, a marathon of sexual endurance which inspired Frank Zappa to nickname them "the Banger sisters."

The label made them legends. But times change, like music, values and lives. It's been more than 20 years since they've seen or even corresponded with each other. Vinnie is now Lavinia, a respectable suburban matron in pearls and perfect pastels, a pillar of the community living like Martha Stewart in a swanky house in Scottsdale, Ariz., with a golden retriever, two teenage daughters and a rich lawyer husband running for political office. Lavinia has successfully deleted all traces of Vinnie from her data base and would like to forget the past, while Suzette still knocks herself cross-eyed trying to relive it.

Suzette is an over-the-hill hippie with tattoos, brio, hair spray and Talking Heads records-a flamboyant farrago of outdated fuchsia. Suzette still digs big hair, Country Joe and the Fish, and cocktails with bamboo umbrellas sticking out of pineapple slices. Her proudest claim to fame is the night Jim Morrison passed out underneath her while "in the act." But if Suzette is kind of desperate and sad, Vinnie is even more delusional. Far removed from the long-ago wild and crazy life, one broad needs a bit less of the past to put the future in its proper perspective, while the other one needs a little more of it to put some fun into the present. It's time for a reunion.

Broke and unemployed, the dishy Suzette piles into the blue jalopy she calls "the Shitbox" and heads for Arizona to borrow a few thousand from her old sidekick. On the road to enlightenment, she picks up a nervous, anal-retentive nerd on his way to Phoenix to murder his father. This third cog in the wheel is brilliantly played in the Peter Sellers tradition by a hilarious Geoffrey Rush. The culture clash is instantaneous: When Goldie Hawn, in her tiger-skin pedal pushers and purple tank tops, invades the suburban world of ritzy white columns and spacious green lawns, freaking out Susan Sarandon in her tailored Barbara Bush ensembles the color of a Greyhound bus station, the laughs are guaranteed.

But The Banger Sisters is also poignant and thoughtful, with real dialogue and character development. In her frazzled, tacky way, Suzette is the one who turns out to have the logic and the integrity. In her own symmetrically dysfunctional way, Vinnie is the one whose perfect life turns out to be a mess, whose husband takes her for granted and whose daughters have serious problems of their own. Poor Geoffrey Rush just needs some Viagra. Before it's over, Suzette liberates them all. She crashes Vinnie out of her beige cocoon, and they stage one last mutiny as middle-aged disco dollies-only to discover that, at their age, things are definitely not the same. Vinnie appears to have it all, but she's lost herself along the way. Suzette hasn't got two quarters to rub together, but despite her breast implants and a wardrobe even Tina Turner wouldn't be caught dead in, she can still teach a few old dogs some new tricks. By the end, everyone learns that it doesn't matter how you live your life; it's how true you are to yourself that counts. Suzette probably can't count to 10, but like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday , she knows the value of freedom to the human heart.

The film's three Oscar-winning stars shine like Christmas ornaments. Mr. Rush is a major comic discovery as a doofus who turns his own life around after one night in Goldie's hotel sheets. Ms. Hawn's hoarse giggle, twitching lips and big gumdrop eyes make Suzette a tomato to die for. (It makes me sick to think of the vivid, vivacious roles Hollywood never asked her to play; what rapture it would have been to see her tackle Born Yesterday , Sweet Charity or Chicago .) Ms. Sarandon is a crisp counterpart to Goldie's bona fide dingaling charm, balancing their duet with pragmatism, polish and moo-cow eyes. They're two sides of the same coin, fresh from Fort Knox and ready to spin. (Opens Sept. 20.)

A Preppy's Lost Illusions

Igby Goes Down , a dark, quirky and relentlessly fascinating first feature by the promising director Burr Steers, takes a fresh, insightful look at an old familiar movie staple: dysfunctional WASP's and their tortured, overeducated and precociously rebellious offspring. From John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down to Robert Redford's Ordinary People , right down to more recent entries like The Royal Tenenbaums and Tadpole , the movies have an enduring obsession with telling stories about the angst-ridden preppie teens of dysfunctional families, but no one has told one better than Mr. Steers, and it's been a long time since the screen has produced a more charmingly muddled or more consistently interesting kid than 17-year-old Jason (Igby) Slocumb. Smartly and sarcastically played by Kieran Culkin, Igby is Holden Caulfield on Special K.

The old adage that money and privilege can't buy happiness is an outmoded and simplistic supposition that is often easily disproved. But in Igby's case, a lifetime of rejection has produced battle wounds. The ennui and insecurity derived from a cold Connecticut childhood and family experiences that are anything but unconventional have left him understandably nervous, distracted and high-strung. Dad (Bill Pullman) showed early signs of schizophrenia by appearing nude at the family dinner table and has now been locked away in a rest home for distinguished breakdowns that is draining the family of its old inherited money. Mom (Susan Sarandon) is a pill-popping hypochondriac who is slowly dying of breast cancer. Handsome older brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe) is a materialistic conservative majoring in economics at Columbia who regards his younger sibling as a cruel trick of biological fate and a royal pain in the ass. ("If Gandhi had spent any prolonged amount of time with you, he would have kicked the living shit out of you!")

Everyone is so self-absorbed they've ignored Igby all of his life. Kicked out of prep schools, a military academy and a drug-rehab clinic for majoring in attitude, Igby finally stages his own declaration of independence and goes on the lam in Manhattan with his mother's credit card. A rich kid out of control in the bohemian underworld quickly finds a lot of fast company, including a cynical Bennington girl with a semester off (Claire Danes) and a wealthy godfather (Jeff Goldblum) with a house in the Hamptons, a wife Igby describes as "no longer the sharpest tool in the shed," and a drug-dealing mistress (Amanda Peet) who betrays them all.

Igby is the camera that records their quirks and their barbs, while bopping his way through fields of drugs, false values, insanity, one mercy fuck and, eventually, even a mercy killing. Inevitably, Igby must go down, smashing into a brick wall of disillusionment and the death of idealism, and when it happens, it's heartbreaking.

I won't reveal the details or share the specifics. I don't want to risk dissuading prospective ticket-buyers from the perceptive and engaging experience that awaits them. I can tell you the magnetic cast is uniformly thrilling, and the sometimes-disturbing events that shape Igby's lost illusions are always leavened by Burr Steers' meticulous direction and witty writing. He's a director worth keeping an eye on. He can touch you deeply, then make you think and laugh at the same time. (Ms. Danes, upon meeting Mr. Phillippe, a beautiful lockjawed snob, for the first time: "So you're the fascist brother." Igby: "He prefers 'Young Republican.'") The lines just keep on coming, adding ballast and humor to Igby's sad plight. The audience roared with surprise when someone laments the fate of a drag queen whose show has just flopped: "I told her Lorna Luft is just too obscure-people will think you're just doing a bad Liza!"

I really loved this movie. If a kid this sensitive, appealing and deserving of attention goes down, I want to go down with him. (Opens Sept. 13.)

An Untold Holocaust Chapter

Shanghai Ghetto is a don't-miss documentary about a hidden chapter in the history of shame, one that has never been told before. Produced and directed by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann, and narrated by Martin Landau, it tells what happened in 1939 to thousands of Jews who fled Nazi Germany after all exit visas were denied and the doors of embassies everywhere (including America) were closed. As one survivor says: "The world didn't give a damn."

The only port that welcomed refugees without papers was Shanghai. The Chinese were in worse shape under Japanese rule than the Jews, so there was no anti-Semitism, no criticism and no questions asked. There was also no drinkable water, no toilets and no employment. Conditions were overcrowded, unsanitary and politically corrupt. But in the struggle to find temporary hospitals and communal kitchens, two different cultures merged with music, medicine and mutual respect, and out of nothing the resourceful Jewish outcasts created poetry, cabaret, boxing and soccer teams, and makeshift ways to earn money.

Things got worse when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Japan and Germany became allies, and the occupation government began imprisoning both the Jews and the British who had helped them survive. Shanghai became a tug of war between two enemy nations and a military target for American bombers.

It is wrenching to see grown men and women revisit the ghetto where they lived as children piled 10 to a room, counting to see who could find the most bugs in their food. From family photos, interviews and action footage of the burning synagogues of Kristallnacht , up to the modern-day Shanghai where the Jewish ghetto remains unchanged, the Amins have constructed a wrenching dossier of mortgaged lives and surrendered dreams that cannot fail to render you speechless. Like all great films about a life you never knew existed, it offers much to absorb and even more to think about after the final frame. Arriving on the anniversary of 9/11, Shanghai Ghetto is a powerful, disturbing and eye-opening film about aggression and its aftermath that makes you doubly glad to be alive. (Opens Sept. 27.)

To most people who have been following the art market for the past seven years, auction fever is as unknown a phenomenon as disco fever. But on that November day at Christie's, the untitled Basquiat drawing sold for a record $255,500. Richard Marshall, a curator who has worked with the Basquiat estate and served on a committee that authenticated the untitled drawing, said that he knew something was up after the price quickly passed the $100,000 mark. "It was kind of exciting because it kept going," Mr. Marshall recalled, referring to the bidding. "It was entertaining and surprising. I turned around to see who was bidding. The auctioneer kept saying, 'In the back of the room,' and I wanted to see who it was."

The person in the back of the room was Leo Malca, an art collector from Cali, Colombia, who rented a gallery last year to show his collection of Basquiats, as well as works by Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. Mr. Malca, a self-described "passionate collector," told The Observer that he was determined to buy the drawing but grew anxious as he realized that not one but two other people were bidding against him. One was on the telephone with Mr. Ségalot. The other was seated in front of him.

"When it went higher and higher, I thought the other two people were not going to stop. For some reason, they stopped at that price. I had a ceiling. It was where I stopped," he said. His last bid was $230,000. With the buyer's premium that Christie's charges its clients, Mr. Malca paid a total of $255,500 for the drawing. A year ago, according to Tony Shafrazi, a dealer who specializes in works by Basquiat, the drawing would have been worth $100,000, "tops."

To Mr. Shafrazi, Basquiat is "a daily meal," he said, and the renewed strength in the Basquiat market is not a surprise. Basquiat, who died in 1988 at the age of 27, left an estate that contained thousands of artworks, a legacy that resulted in a movie, Basquiat , and a cult following that rivals that of Andy Warhol. According to Mr. Shafrazi, the market for Basquiats dropped precipitously in the early 90's, like the rest of the art market. "Where works had been going for $550,000," he said, "they were worth $300,000. Some works did not sell at all." But now, according to Mr. Shafrazi, the market is back, "but with intelligence. That drawing is one of the 10 great drawings done by Basquiat. It is as great as a Picasso."

The drawing, which features a central figure in the middle of a deeply worked ground of calligraphy, does look like a late Picasso, an analogy that does not seem to have hurt the drawing. "When you think about it in terms of Picasso," said Mr. Shafrazi, "this is a really good buy. A Picasso drawing like this would be worth a million dollars." The other Basquiats in the Christie's sale also achieved high prices. An untitled drawing that was expected to go for $60,000 to $80,000 went for $195,000. "Made in Japan," a drawing that depicts a masked figure, was sold for $134,500. "Gin Soaked Critic," an insectlike stick figure baring his teeth of gouache on paper mounted on board, also fetched $134,500. "These are the best Basquiat drawings you can find," said Mr. Ségalot, who also compared the drawings to Picassos, the benchmark, it seems, for art garnering high prices at auction. "I was not surprised by the prices," he said confidently.

Gerard Basquiat, the father of the late artist who also manages his estate, was not available for comment. But Mr. Basquiat may have been the least surprised by the auction results. Two years ago, he stopped the flow of artworks from the Basquiat estate that had been going into the market at a steady clip since the artist's death. Mr. Marshall, who advises Mr. Basquiat on curatorial matters, said that he does not know why Mr. Basquiat decided to withhold the pictures in the estate from the market. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that basic supply and demand would invariably drive up the price of individual Basquiats once such a major source has been stopped.

Still, Mr. Malca feels that he has made a good investment. "I have already been offered more than I paid for it," he said.

He Never Signed a Work: Hugh Auchincloss Steers

If Hugh Steers had lived longer, he might have become the next Lucien Freud. That, it seems, was the consensus of a group of Chelsea art lovers and family members of the late artist, who died of AIDS in 1995 at the age of 33. They had gathered at the Richard Anderson Fine Arts gallery on the evening of Nov. 22 for the first show of the artist's work since his death. It is also the debut show at the relocated gallery.

In loaded paintings that centered on figures drawn with the facility of a Renaissance artist, Steers, like Mr. Freud, used flesh in deeply personal ways. In Steers' case, the figures have to do with his male sexual preference and fascination with the accouterments of downtown drag culture.

"I just hope that Hugh doesn't get pigeonholed as a gay AIDS artist," said Burr Steers, the artist's brother and one of the co-heirs of the estate. Mr. Steers is a Hollywood-based movie actor whose next role is as a "door Nazi" in The Last Days of Disco , Wit Stillman's film about Studio 54 that opens next summer. "I play the guy at the door who tells people they can't come into the place," he said. Their mother Nina Auchincloss Straight was the stepsister of the late Jacqueline Onassis and half-sister of Gore Vidal. Mr. Steers pointed out, though, that his brother consciously refused to trade on his family's name.

"Several dealers wanted him to go as Hugh Auchincloss Steers. That's his full name. He refused. He would threaten to wound you," said Mr. Steers. "I really admired that. He lived the artist's life on Avenue B. He could have painted horses and debutantes and made a lot of dough up in Newport selling stuff to our relatives."