This is the crux of That Championship Season, which debuted at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in 1972, was transferred to Broadway later that year, and the next spring won both the best play Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

It is also the story of That Championship Season, which opened in a star-studded but disappointingly lackluster revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre Sunday night. Jason Miller's play was once a champion--it became a well-regarded 1982 film, with another all-star cast--but what's now onstage at the Jacobs is forgettable, maudlin, overly tidy and dramatically unconvincing. Like its characters, it has reached middle age, and like them, middle age doesn't look good on it.

The scene is a worn Victorian living room someplace in blue-collar Pennsylvania. It's 1972, and four members of the 1952 state-champion high-school basketball team are gathered at Coach's house to commemorate that great win, to drink and brag, as they do every year. They were, we're told, a legendary squad.

Twenty years later, they're still tight, big men in their small city. George is the mayor, up for reelection, mildly corrupt and mildly competent. Phil is a successful businessman, making money by polluting the city, paying George with campaign donations so the government looks the other way, driving fast cars and sleeping around. James is dedicated but dutiful, George's campaign manager and a junior-high principal, feeling trapped in his job. Tom, his brother, is a charming alcoholic who bounces from city to city. And then there's Coach, to whom they all still turn for guidance, a petty but inspiring bigot with no family of his own, obsessed with the past, from that championship to Teddy Roosevelt to Joe McCarthy. As the evening progresses, they'll get drunk, reveal truths, confess doubts, hug and make up. It's a play about simple men adrift in a rapidly changing America, astonished and dismayed that a Jewish environmentalist could potentially unseat good old Mayor George.

Ah, the past. When That Championship Season opened at the Public in 1972, Clive Barnes called it in The New York Times "the perfect Broadway play of the season, perfectly acted and perfectly staged" (with the asterisk that "it happens not to be on Broadway"). So how come it's now so far from perfect?

Perhaps it's because the play is so predictable. From searing classics like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to amiable trifles like A Perfect Future, which recently came and went Off Broadway, the drunken-night-of-revelation genre is well worn. None of the revelations are particularly surprising, as the script dutifully rotates through its players, giving each an opportunity for his crisis. In fact, the only surprise might be that these men, who betray each other in turn, inexplicably end the night as friends again.

Perhaps it's because the world has changed so much. America in 2011 is going through profound transformations, economically, socially, demographically, that are not dissimilar to those buffeting northeastern Pennsylvania in 1972. But in facing our own problems, it is hard to have sympathy for a bunch of corrupt racists, high-school jocks who discover a winning season doesn't guarantee a winning life.

And perhaps it's because this Championship cast never melds into an effective whole. Clive Barnes called the original ensemble "simply the best of the season," and maybe if the current group could become a convincing band of brothers, its disintegration would be meaningful. But director Gregory Mosher, who did such excellent work last season in A View From the Bridge, allows his high-profile cast to display such a range of acting styles that the men barely appear to be in the same play, and certainly not on the same team.

The estimable Brian Cox is Coach, and he plays the character that represents the past as an actor from another era. His performance is all oration and sputtering, a high-energy vaudeville routine disconnected from the others' naturalism. Jason Patric, whose father wrote the play, portrays Tom as a 21st-century ironist, a wise drunk who comments on the scene with wry detachment, never making himself present, not even when he's the focus of attention.

In the middle are Kiefer Sutherland as James, Chris Noth as Phil and Jim Gaffigan as the mayor, who all manage to get it right: They effectively portray stolid, all-American Real Men, from a time when all-American Real Men took the role seriously. Sure, Mr. Sutherland is miscast--Jack Bauer shouldn't try for nebbish--but he does all right. Mr. Noth is spot-on as the slick, rich nihilist, a role for which he has plenty of practice.

The revelation is Mr. Gaffigan, best known as a comic and making his Broadway debut. He's charismatic while playing a loser, sensitive in playing a boor. He, here, is perhaps the only champion.

There are many things to admire about Good People, a very funny and very serious drama about class and conflict in Boston that opened in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre last week. Chief among them is its very good people.

It is written by David Lindsay-Abaire, whose Rabbit Hole debuted at the Friedman five seasons ago, won the Pulitzer, and became a film this winter. It stars Frances McDormand, who has a big enough name to help lure ticket-buyers while also being an excellent theater actress, here giving an anguished and moving performance as Margie, with a hard G, the Irish Catholic single mother at the center of the play. And it is directed by Daniel Sullivan, who, as he did with Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still at the same theater last year, assembles a talented and coherent cast and uses them to make a good play great.

This is not the emotional tour de force that is Rabbit Hole, but it is a compelling and clear-eyed work, a portrait of proud and tribal South Boston, a struggling woman who knows she's stuck there and one guy--her high-school boyfriend, now a doctor--who made it out. It's a smart exploration of American class divides, so often ignored or smoothed over, and it raises unanswerable question about what makes a good person.

But the greatest pleasure comes in just watching the actors: Ms. McDormand as Margie, both steely and vulnerable; Tate Donovan as the ex-boyfriend-made-good, a charmer with the old-neighborhood edge buried under his Ivy League veneer; Renée Elise Goldsberry as his wife, a privileged woman with her own problems, trying hard not to condescend to an interloper she'd though was the help; Becky Ann Baker as Margie's best friend, tough as nails; Patrick Carroll as the lifelong acquaintance forced to fire her; and, most memorably, the incomparable Estelle Parsons as her blowsy, canny battle axe of a landlady.

It is, you might say, one of the best ensembles of the season.

editorial@observer.com

Here is yet another DC comic book targeted for an army of brain-dead kids, with animated action heroes brought to life without a shred of wit, imagination or cinematic talent. The plot, which you could carve on the head of a carpet tack, involves yet another “Special Forces Unit” (whatever that is) composed of five rogue C.I.A. operatives on a secret terrorist-finding mission who get double-crossed by yet another C.I.A. master villain called Max. Ambushed, deserted and targeted for death, on a plane that blows up with 25 innocent children on their way to safety, the team is deserted in the Bolivian jungle and presumed dead. The rest of the movie is about how they survive, get out of the jungle and head for Miami via Dubai, Mumbai, Texas, the Mexican border and the port of Los Angeles, to clear their names and get revenge. Typical of the hurdles they are forced to endure is a near-fatal hook-up with yet another sexy, karate-chopping operative named Aisha (Zoe Saldana), who is also tracking Max with an agenda that is never satisfactorily explained. When the captain of the Losers (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) takes her to his bedroom, they beat the hell out of each other for no reason whatsoever and set the hotel on fire. Naturally, they end up in sheets that haven’t seen the inside of a Laundromat in several years. Not much to look forward to in Bolivia.

As much as I hated Avatar, Ms. Saldana looked better painted blue. It is never clear who she is or where she works, but she’s tougher than the rest of the Losers put together. (When she was a child, she collected human ears.) Max (Jason Patric) is the kind of C.I.A. SOB who dresses like Tennessee Williams; promises one billion dollars to Dubai thugs for atomic missiles so powerful they haven’t even been invented yet; then blows out the brains of an over-endowed Lolita who drops his umbrella. Planning an international terrorist conflict with weapons that will change the world, Mr. Patric has the most fun of anybody, probably because he’s the best actor. The team’s computer hacking geek is played by Chris Evans, who wisely vacillates between Tennessee Williams scripts (The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond) and crapola that makes money, like the Fantastic Four flicks. The rest of the cast is as memorable as last week’s egg foo yong. Racing to the rescue to save their country, the indestructible Losers get burned, stabbed, slashed, blown through windshields, thrown through plate glass windows and bombed by special effects, with no more damage than a paper cut. One gets shot in both legs and still walks away, like somebody on a Jerry Lewis telethon. I guess it doesn’t matter that none of this violent nonsense makes one lick of sense. To me, movies about the C.I.A. never do. I always wonder how covert operatives (that word again) manage to blow up whole cities, and it never even makes the papers. Gullible people are so conditioned to hate the government that you can tell them the C.I.A. is hiding Osama bin Laden in a Georgetown townhouse next door to Hillary Clinton and they’ll believe it.

The Losers is targeted at—and marketed for—them, and an audience of kids who couldn’t care less. The script, by James Vanderbilt (no relation to Gloria) and a once-gifted actor named Peter Berg, sounds like it was written with soft No. 2 lead pencils on Big Chief tablet paper. As a director, Sylvain White would make a much better sanitation worker. He is clueless about how to tell a story with any kind of arc. The producer is Joel Silver, who has made a career out of dispensing junk, and as long as the junk makes money, it will proliferate. Kids may enjoy The Losers enough to wish for more. At the end, the evil Max phones again, assuring all and sundry that his death has been as overrated as honesty on Wall Street, and guaranteeing a sequel. Next time, I’ll plan to be out of town.

rreed@observer.com

Running time: 96 minutes
Written by: Peter Berg, James Vanderbilt
Directed by: Sylvain White
Starring: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Idris Elba, Columbus Short, Jason Patric

1 Eyeball out of 4

Cameron Diaz plays the mother; Sofia Vassilieva the daughter.

“I know what it is to love very deeply,” Ms. Diaz said, wearing a white dress with a strap over one shoulder, “to the point where I would do anything for the people that I love, but obviously, I don’t know what it’s like to have a child dying with cancer.”

Ms. Vassillieva had to shave her head for the part. “Getting the role happened so quickly. It was in February of 2008, right after finals, and I remember being exhausted and crazy and having this script. ... I feel when you become invested in something, when you smile for something or when something makes you cry, you become invested, there is a bond created.”

The movie was directed by Nick Cassavetes, and his mother, actress Gena Rowlands, was there to support him, resplendent in red lipstick.

“I like this movie very much,” she said. “I think that we have been through a period where we have seen so much mechanical stuff and cars crashing into another, that we are quite happy to see something that actually happens to other people.”

Jason Patric, who plays Ms. Vassilieva's father, agreed.

“I think if anything is behaviorally real, people connect to it,” Mr. Patric said, wearing a gray suit and black tie. “Hopefully, people need to contact to their humanness, and if something is heavier in the middle of, you know, the robot weekend, they’ll take a peek.”

Evan Ellison, 20,  was cast as neglected boy in the family. “This kind of movie doesn’t come out that often,” he said. “The depth of it is very good and the cast is great. The story line is sad, very sad, but I thing is there is also a lot of happiness in it.”

Alas, we did not get a chance to speak to Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin, who plays the healthy sister.

A less talented director than the sensitive, polished and mature master craftsman Nick Cassavetes might fail to lift My Sister’s Keeper above the level of suicidal depression. It’s about  a 14-year-old girl dying of cancer, but don’t let the subject matter deter you from experiencing a film of such heartfelt magic, wisdom and hope. The writing team of Jeremy Leven and director Cassavetes, who brought us the memorable and deeply effective film The Notebook, have joined forces with a great cast to bring the best-selling book by Jodi Picoult to life with a purity that can only be called inspirational.

Nothing Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric have ever done prepared me for their emotionally charged performances as the parents of three children coping with death in diverse ways. When their 2-year-old daughter, Kate, was diagnosed with a terminal illness, Sara and Brian Fitzgerald (Ms. Diaz and Mr. Patric) had only one prayer: to conceive another daughter through genetic engineering to be a perfect chromosomal match for her older sister’s blood type and keep her alive. Now Kate, magnificently played by an astounding newcomer, Sofia Vassilieva, depends entirely on her little sister, Anna (Abigail Breslin), for survival. Every member of the family is impacted in some way. Kate feels guilty for turning Anna into a human guinea pig, sharing blood cells, donating bone marrow and enduring numerous crippling surgeries. Their parents fight; their brother has lost focus and is wandering aimlessly toward crime. They’ve been so involved with the problems of the two girls that they never had the time to figure out that their son is dyslexic. So Anna rebels against her fate as a “donor child” and decides to sue her family for the right to control her own body. She’s only 11, and the legal age for “child emancipation” in California is 14. So she hires her own lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to sign her petition, and with the resulting court trial, the family will never be the same. 

Instead of taking Kate home to die, or spending quality time with her, Sara insists she endure a kidney replacement, a surgical procedure the hospital will not perform with an unwilling donor. Anna’s shocking revelation of why she wants to quit comes late and strengthens everyone’s definition of loyalty and love. Thanks to meticulous details, a wide spectrum of issues and consistently well-developed character analysis, My Sister’s Keeper never becomes a Disease of the Week flick. There is nothing routine about it. Nevertheless, be forewarned: a nickel pack of Kleenex won’t do. A touching subplot about Kate’s romance with another teenage hospital patient, culminating in the courage of two kids in their first (and final) blush of sexual experimentation, will fail to move only callous cynics with scar tissue for a heart. It may not be the kind of feel-good movie that reflects Ms. Diaz’s customary bright and breezy self, but it’s saved from wrenching sentimentality by a lot of wonderful actors (wait until you see the usually frenetic comedian Joan Cusack do the most introspective work of her career, as the conflicted judge hearing the case after losing her own daughter). Richly textured, subtle yet electrifying, My Sister’s Keeper is an experience that will leave you shaken.

rreed@observer.com

In the creepy cinematic genre “Movies to Commit Suicide by,” a new entry: Downloading Nancy, a dismal mess by Johan Renck, a Swedish director of music videos and TV commercials who is clueless about telling a narrative story. Not only does it waste the audience’s time with 102 minutes of misery and despair, but it also trashes the talents of four fine actors who should have stayed in bed reading better screenplays that deserve attention and enhance careers.

Nancy (Maria Bello) is a wretched creature trapped in a pitiable 15-year marriage of such despondency that her definition of life is “like being trapped in the wrong house trying to find a way out” and her definition of death is “freedom and deliverance, like waking from a bad dream.” Not much in between except a shrink (Amy Brenneman) who works on value and self-respect to no avail, and tries to convince her that being raped repeatedly by her favorite uncle in childhood did not make her a bad person. But Nancy is so far gone that it’s too late for tears. Once in her doctor’s office, she goes into the bathroom and slices open her sex organs with a razor blade. Near-catatonic from depression, she spends half of her time self-inflicting numerous wounds that leave her body bleeding and scarred, and the other half buried in her computer searching for someone to kill her. It gets worse.

One day her husband, Albert (Rufus Sewell), comes home from one of his long absences to nowhere and finds a note saying Nancy has gone to Baltimore to visit friends. She never returns. Trapped in the dark passages of her own mind, Nancy thinks she has finally found liberation in the form of a cruel degenerate she meets on the Internet named Louis (Jason Patric). Louis promises escape, salvation, sexual perversion and murder. When she says, “I’m gonna need something to wear for my big finish,” you get the feeling she plans to commit suicide again and make it work. (In flashbacks, we see her try it with her arm in a sling and an endless supply of those lethal razor blades.) But Louis has slower cat-and-mouse games in mind. He blindfolds her and makes her walk barefoot into rat traps. Now we have two lost souls torturing each other. The greater the physical violence, the more Nancy likes it. And just wait till they get to the hardware store, where they almost salivate thinking of new things to do with the vast array of knives, hatchets, thumbtacks and carpet nails. More customers like Nancy and Louis could keep Home Depot solvent through three more recessions.

Meanwhile, for no explainable reason, Louis pays a visit to Albert, pretending to be a computer online service maintenance expert. Albert wants to read Nancy’s masochistic emails, hoping for a clue as to where she’s gone, but when Louis prints them out, they bring out Albert’s repressed sadism instead. Now it’s Louis’ turn to be bound and tortured with a golf club. There’s more, but why go on? The movie jumps around in time, in the annoying way amateurs make movies today. You don’t know where the people are when they are working each over or whether they’re dead already. It all ends badly, with Albert fingering his own razor blades, which Nancy has left behind, inserted in his cell phone.

Downloading Nancy is pretty much dead on arrival. It’s like one of those repulsive horror flicks by the Austrian whack job Michael Haneke. By piling on the sordid shocks without reason, motivation, character development or psychological analysis, director Renck and the two dolorous scriptwriters, Pamela Cuming and Lee Ross, have stripped it of any functionality and rendered it pointless. In all of the degradation, you don’t much care what the people do next. You just want them to get it over with faster. This is a shame because Maria Bello is a cool, literate and fascinating blonde who warrants more serious attention. In disturbing roles like the prostitute Bill Macy picks up in The Cooler and Viggo Mortensen’s wife in A History of Violence, she does fresh things with confusion and cutting-edge pain. Here, she is hollow-eyed, anemic, without makeup, her roots showing under her split ends, covered with scars—and still captivating. But it’s a role with a lot of degradation and no payoff. Whatever happens to Nancy in the end is strangely inconsequential. Cynical, negative and futile, the movie doesn’t register anything you can learn anything from. I think it’s supposed to be a Nietzsche-fueled examination of utter futility and nihilism. But to me, it’s more of a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology. At the end, the words “Based on true events” appear against a black screen. So what? Does this mean every time somebody self-destructs we need to see a movie about it?

Downloading Nancy made me good and sick—and the way I remember it, that is not the way movies are supposed to make us feel. Gillette disposables, anyone?

rreed@observer.com

“Expired” is the word you see before they tow your car away. So it is little wonder that a new movie called Expired should be about—what else?—a meter maid. “I’m one of the most hated people in the world,” says Claire, a poor, hapless Santa Monica parking enforcement officer played with wistful, unhappy but eternally optimistic fervor by the quirky actress Samantha Morton. “People run from me like the plague. Insult me. Give me the finger. Verbally abuse me.” And while they do it, she smiles sweetly and says, “Have a nice day.” Next to dentists, meter maids probably have the highest professional mortality rate.

Life is miserable at home, too. Lonely, plain, unmarried, Claire’s life story is written in invisible ink. She shares a bleak little house with flickering light bulbs and garish, fading wallpaper with her invalid mother (Teri Garr), who suffers from dementia. It’s such a dull life they order their Christmas tree from a catalog. Things start to show promise when Claire meets another traffic warden named Jay (Jason Patric), but he turns out to be a hostile, miserable loser—so angry he kicks people’s tires and punches them out in the middle of the street. Claire tries to be consistent in her compassion, offering help and friendly advice, but Jay is so incapable of any emotion except rage that he spends his evenings off eating sandwiches, watching TV and dialing for telephone sex. He’s an asocial mixture of nice-guy support and obnoxious cruelty. (The night Claire’s mother has a stroke while mashing potatoes, he gets out of bed to call an ambulance, then tells her, “You know, you should whiten your teeth.”) Even on an escape from L.A. to Pomona to visit her crazy aunt (also played by Teri Garr, with a bit more animation and a different wig), Claire is constantly ridiculed and tortured by Jay, whose sarcasm finally sheds some light on the banal hopelessness of their aborted romance. By the time this offbeat love story about two extremely unhinged, likable but mismatched eccentrics grinds to a close, Claire has learned to be that rarest of things—not only a meter maid, but a compassionate meter maid. (She watches over people’s cars when their meters expire.) It could never happen in New York.

Made for peanuts by writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi, this bargain-basement indie-prod is slow in tempo but never dull, thanks to Ms. Morton, whose naïve, wide-eyed bewilderment resembles a newborn bird that just cracked out of a claustrophobic shell searching for its first worm; and Mr. Patric, playing against type in the kind of light, bumbling role usually reserved for Tony Danza. It’s rare to see him without his usual clenched fists and pounding testosterone; he’s such a mess as a walking road rage waiting to explode that he makes you laugh in spite of yourself. It makes you realize how most of his movie roles have wasted him shamefully.

rreed@observer.com

In his directing debut, Richard Curtis, beloved as the screenwriter of Notting Hill , Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones's Diary , bastes a bloated battalion of bores for what is supposed to be a celebratory feast devoted to the theory that even in troubled and cynical times, "love actually is everywhere." Nice sentiment for a needlepoint sampler, maybe, but the multiple stories designed to conjure visions of this filmmaker's sugar plums add up to no more than skits on British telly about fathers and sons, husbands and wives, friends and officemates, aging rock stars and the horny heads of mighty nations. Except for one black person, they are all white-bread Anglo-Saxon heterosexuals, which should give you some idea of how believable, diverse and au courant the movie is. The cast of characters is vast, with a famous face in almost every cameo, and includes a cuckolded crime writer (Colin Firth) who flees to the South of France for inspiration and falls for a housekeeper who speaks nothing but Portuguese; a recently widowed father (Liam Neeson) who shares his powers of seduction with his precocious 11-year-old son; and a shy junior manager (Laura Linney) who has a mad crush on a sexy co-worker, but is too disabled by a guilt-ridden pathological devotion to her mentally ill brother to consummate the affair. Meanwhile, her fatuous boss (Alan Rickman) busily toys with getting himself seduced by the office slut, torturing his long-suffering but devoted wife (Emma Thompson), who is the sister of England's randy new prime minister (Hugh Grant), who chases everything in panties. Mr. Grant, who has never passed a mirror he didn't want to kiss, does an oversexed bachelor spin on Tony Blair while nose-thumbing an oil painting of Margaret Thatcher. He's the most absurd character on the premises-a hip P.M. who discos till dawn, shakes his fanny through the halls of 10 Downing Street and, in the film's most implausible sequence, battles for the sexual conquest of a curvaceous staff member with the lecherous, fang-dripping and thoroughly obnoxious President of the United States (Billy Bob Thornton, in another of his many wigs, parodying the worst flaws of both Bill Clinton and George Bush).

Had enough? I haven't even gotten to the part about the naked couple who meet as stand-ins for two porno stars, or the beautiful new bride torn between her groom and his best man, or the waiter who travels all the way to Wisconsin to find fulfillment with two American nymphomaniacs at the same time, or the vulgar, clownish has-been pop singer (Bill Nighy) trying to make a comeback. Some of the sketches come to nothing, others are abandoned totally when writer-director Curtis runs out of ideas and can't think of anything else for them to say. All of them are accompanied by a relentless, headache-inducing score of noisy, second-rate tunes from the British pop charts.

It isn't often that you find so many swell folks making asses of themselves while trying desperately to seem très amusant . I found them all lost, superficial and annoyingly dull. In the end, the whole cast alights from the same plane in the arrivals hall at Heathrow. Where did they go? When did they leave? Why are they all on the same flight? And while I'm asking questions, where are Glenn Miller, Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart?

This movie is so unfunny, uninspired and unoriginal I swear it could have started out as a club-footed Coen Brothers vehicle for George Clooney. Certainly it's a misguided catastrophe on the level of Intolerable Cruelty . In fairness, I confess I seem to be a minority of one. People all around me screamed with delight every time Hugh Grant bumbled and winked and flirted with himself in the paroxysm of self-love that has become his acting style. People need humor, no matter how dense and doltish it is. They need a little Christmas, they need it early, and the idiotic thought of Britain's prime minister dashing through the snow on Christmas Eve looking for poontang and getting trapped in a roundelay of Christmas carols is enough to satisfy the most sophomoric tastes. I don't know what other light refreshments are planned for the forthcoming festive season, but personally, I like a little higher octane in my holiday punch.

Dance Therapy

Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks is a two-hander about the lonely, rigid widow of a Baptist minister filling in the blank spaces and empty days of her retirement years in Florida, and the troubled, flamboyant and angry gay dance instructor who arrives for weekly sessions of bitchy tea and sympathy. In two acts and seven scenes, the "passive-aggressive queen with bad attitude" and the "tight-assed old biddy" mellow and melt their protective veneers until she learns to jitterbug, tango, waltz, fox-trot, cha-cha and disco, he learns to trust, and both of them learn the healing powers of compassion and the restorative values of friendship. It's the kind of sit-com that should keep community dinner theaters busy for years. The play isn't much, but the main reasons to see it in its present form are called Polly Bergen and Mark Hamill. They are knockouts, dispensing magic in two stylish, high-spirited star turns of vigor, versatility and just the right combination of humor and humanity to make audiences laugh and cry at the same time. You won't find actors of their eminence in summer stock. How lucky we are that they dropped in.

Ailing Cat

Like most Tennessee Williams plays, I've seen countless productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , but none as limp as the current revival at the Music Box. From the ludicrous set to the exaggerated Southern drawls, nothing jells. I've visited my share of plantations in the Mississippi Delta, but I have yet to find one with brown rattan, white wicker, wooden wainscoting, wrought iron and ugly upholstery in the same room. This could be a house in the Bronx, but never the estate of a rich cotton planter like Big Daddy. As the vulgar, self-made redneck dying of cancer, Ned Beatty is no Burl Ives, but the second act, which is his big scene with his alcoholic son Brick, shows him off to excellent advantage and is the best of the three acts. The big surprise is Jason Patric as a studly, understated Brick. Usually Brick is a disillusioned observer, pickled in bourbon and nearly catatonic. Mr. Patric is an arresting mixture of sensuality and dissipation whose flame still burns brightly behind glazed eyes. The big disappointment is movie star Ashley Judd as his conniving wife, Maggie. Of all the mesmerizing ladies I have seen in this commanding and erotic role, she is the choppiest, flightiest, noisiest and least convincing. Her accent is so phony that, like everything in Anthony Page's production, it seems made in Taiwan. Every word is accompanied by a gesture, whole sentences stick to the roof of her mouth like grits. Worst of all, this Maggie and Brick seem to hate each other. They talk over and around each other, rarely touching or making eye contact. In the last scene, when Ms. Judd moves Mr. Patric to the bed to conceive the child that might seal their inheritance of Big Daddy's money, there is so little warmth and chemistry between them that they scarcely look like they have even been introduced. I don't think this is exactly what Tennessee Williams had in mind for two of his sexiest animals, fighting tooth and claw for domination of the species. This Cat doesn't growl, it just meows awhile and wanders off looking for Little Friskies.

From its opening credits against a background of Alex Katz paintings with their coolly detached human subjects parading in a void fashioned from their own spiritual emptiness, to its last chilling shot of sex without love, exploitation without communication, a trap with no exit, Your Friends and Neighbors plows through a minefield of lies, deceptions and betrayals exploding emotionally into fragments of shattered characters and relationships. The spare, eerily unromantic score is, according to Mr. LaBute, three Metallica songs arranged and performed by four cellists from Finland called Apocalyptica. The effect is consistent with the conception of the film as a piece of postmodern chamber drama. The writer-director has deliberately avoided any exterior establishing shots. Everything transpires in apartments, museums, bookstores, college theaters, health clubs. And yet there is no sense of confinement to a stage. The inventiveness of the framing, camera movement and depth of composition is eminently cinematic as it tracks its always clearly focused characters on Mr. LaBute's fiercely combative chessboard. No one has a last name, and no one ever calls anybody by their first name. As in the previous film, no city is specified as the locale.

With In the Company of Men it was possible for the sociologically inclined to suggest that the jungle of corporate America was to blame for the swinish behavior on display. It is not so easy in Your Friends and Neighbors , in which the characters are defined not so much by what they do as by how they maneuver in and out of the bedroom, and what they choose to say about fornication, bisexuality, masturbation and orgasm, with or without conversation. Dysfunction in one form or another is the order of the day and night. Frankness and full disclosure in this context become the enemies of eroticism.

Jason Patric and Aaron Eckhart have been cast-with their enthusiastic approval-conspicuously against type. After a career of playing sensitive and vulnerable male heroes, Mr. Patric has taken on the role of the narcissistically hard-edged Cary, and Mr. Eckhart has altered his womanizing good looks and physique to be more convincing in the part of the cluelessly cuckolded Barry. Ben Stiller once more displays his versatility as the unhappily coupled Jerry, a self-deceiving snake in the grass who initiates the cycle of betrayal by making a play for his best friend's wife (Amy Brenneman) in the midst of a supposedly convivial double date in the targeted wife's apartment. What happens next does not result in a farcical free-for-all, but rather in a grim form of libidinous gridlock. The well is poisoned, and the laughs come with great difficulty.

Everyone works, more or less. Ms. Brenneman's much-abused Mary is a freelance something or other; her husband Barry is vaguely in finance; Catherine Keener's adaptably bisexual Terri, live-in girlfriend of Mr. Stiller's Jerry, is an ad writer for tampons; Nastassja Kinski's lesbian temptress is an artist's "assistant," the prescribed 90's terminology for a secretary putting on airs; Mr. Stiller's Jerry is a college drama teacher for whom the lies of art run a poor second to the lies of life, and Mr. Patric's Cary works somewhere in the non-idealistic field of medicine.

There is a pointed reference to the Restoration dramatist William Wycherley (1640-1716), and a fleeting glimpse of a movie poster of Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 Le Mépris ( Contempt ). Indeed, a thrice-repeated ritualized pickup scene in front of an unseen painting tempts one to label the film as neo-Godardian, or at least neo-Hartleyan. Comparisons have been made also with the dramatic writings of David Mamet and with Mike Nichols and Jules Feiffer's Carnal Knowledge (1971). Yet Mr. LaBute is not quite as lyrically eclectic as Mr. Godard, nor as laconically hostile as Mr. Mamet and his mentor, Harold Pinter, nor as luridly antibourgeois as Mr. Nichols and Mr. Feiffer.

After watching In the Company of Men , I remarked that Mr. LaBute might be able to get by without a heart. But in his second film I can find traces of perceptive compassion that make me eager to see what an artist of Mr. LaBute's demonstrated talent and ambition will do next.

Less Biting, But Just as Highly Recommended

F. Gary Gray's The Negotiator , from a screenplay by James DeMonaco and Kevin Fox, would seem to be too ear-shatteringly pulpy to be mentioned in the same breath as Mr. LaBute's Sundance-sanctioned insolence toward supposedly sure-fire blockbuster formulas. Yet, amid all the contemporary chic blather about the inability of people to communicate with each other, I found it exhilarating to see and hear two fine actors like Samuel Jackson and Kevin Spacey communicating with each other like mad, and deriving great pleasure and mutual respect from their high-pressure articulate exchanges. The characters they play are both professional police negotiators in hazardous hostage situations. Significantly, the one thing they don't talk about is sex, and perhaps that makes all the difference.

While I'm in the mood for dialectical comparisons, I'd like to recommend two charming French films with opposing conclusions about art versus life and fantasy versus reality. On the side of art and fantasy is J.J. Bigas Luna's The Chambermaid on the Titanic , which starts slowly in a dreary French industrial town out of Emile Zola's Germinal in which the company sponsors a brutally demanding race up and down a hill of sludge for an unspecified prize. Olivier Martinez plays the pathetic wretch who somehow survives the grueling contest to come in first. The boss announces the reward: one ticket to Southampton with hotel expenses included to witness the sailing of the Titanic on its ill-fated maiden voyage in 1912, without Leonardo DiCaprio aboard. Since the winner is married to a character played by Romane Bohringer, he naturally wants to take his wife along, but the boss lies that there is only money for one ticket because he wants to make time with the wife while the husband is away.

In Southampton, a woman claiming to be a chambermaid (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) asks to share the hero's room because the hotel is full. The hero reluctantly agrees. Nothing "happens" that night, but when the hero returns home he is greeted by malicious gossip about his wife and the boss, and despite her honest denials, he becomes so enraged that he begins recounting an imaginary affair he had with the "chambermaid" with such detail that he convinces his barroom buddies (and, after a while, even himself) that the liaison actually took place. When the sinking of the Titanic is reported, his story takes on even more poignant overtones, and the hero becomes a highly paid theatrical performer, and his wife, a little jealous even after her husband convinces her that he has made the whole story up from his romantic imagination, plays the supporting role of the doomed chambermaid in the theatrical spectacles. Then the real "chambermaid" shows up and is revealed as a prostitute who never sailed on the Titanic . Yet in the end even she buys into the fantasy.

In contrast is the hero of Tony Gatlif's Gadjo Dilo , a young Parisian named Stéphane, played by Romain Duris, who journeys all the way to Romania to locate a gypsy singer much admired by his late father. He carries with him cassettes of her recorded songs. Though he never finds her despite an extensive search, he becomes enraptured by the sheer buoyancy of gypsy life and music despite all the sadness and persecution these people must endure. In the end, he smashes the cassette and assumes a gypsy identity, no longer wishing to be a "gadjo dilo," or a "crazy outsider" in Romania. He embraces reality at the expense of the long-sought-after illusion. Mr. Gatlif has devoted a great deal of his film career in a frank championing of the indomitable and enduring Gypsy culture that has survived bigots from Adolf Hitler to Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Finally, there's Manuel Poirier's Western , the title of which refers to Brittany, the westernmost prong of the glorious hexagon that is France. Two immigrants, a Spanish shoe salesman and an Italian from Russia, join forces in a seriocomic circular odyssey in search of ever elusive love and sex with a succession of tantalizing females. It is to laugh and almost cry.