Then he remembered Rogues’ Gallery had stirred up some controversy regarding Annette de la Renta, who is a trustee of both the Met and the NYPL.

“A lot of books don’t get in the library,” Mr. Curtis conceded. “It just may be that they’re a little slow to get their act together. But given the social connections, you just have to wonder.”

According to Peter Gethers, the book’s editor, attorneys for Ms. de la Renta have sent more than one “strongly worded” letter to Random House, the publisher of Rogues’ Gallery, about the final section, which focuses on her and her mother, Jane Engelhard. (Ms. de la Renta’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.)

Mr. Gethers said the library ordered copies of the book, and those orders would have been filled within two weeks of the book’s publication, on May 5. “It makes no sense that the library isn’t carrying the book,” he said. “I’m sure they have not taken books for sexual content, but I’ve never heard of the New York Public Library not carrying a book for political or social content.” (He also edited Kitty Kelley’s book about the Bush dynasty; the NYPL has 33 copies of that.)

Library officials had no comment on the situation, so the Transom called the main help desk. The librarian on the other end seemed puzzled by his inability to find the book in the library system, though he said books often take between a week and four months to catalog. More popular books tend to get priority, he said, and after pulling up Mr. Gross’ previous books, he seemed to think this one would fall in that class. He also said that books are often in the system even as they undergo cataloging, but he saw no sign of Rogues’ Gallery.

In general, Ms. de la Renta appears to be a rather committed booster of the cataloging process. The library’s 2008 annual report lists an Anne E. de la Renta Cataloging Endowment Fund as part of a list of endowments that were started with a donation of at least $100,000. The library has 18 circulating copies of Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley, which came out on the same day as Rogues’ Gallery. It has more than 20 copies of Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards, which came out a week later.

But if you want to borrow a copy of Rogue’s Gallery, you’ll have to head to the outer boroughs: The Brooklyn Public Library has 18 copies in circulation; the Queens Library has 61. As for Mr. Curtis? “I paid retail for it, which, for a professional literary agent, is scandalous.”

Yet What Alice Found is hardly a cult B-picture from the bygone days of double features-the acting and writing are much too good for that, and the grown-up sex on display is explicit without being degrading or exploitational. Still, as the title suggests, there's a fairy-tale quality to this rite-of-passage adventure of menaced innocence that evokes a darker Alice in Wonderland , a tale of malignant mysteries on the open highway traversed by cars, trucks and R.V.'s (recreational vehicles), the latter carrying the restless spirit of the narrative.

When we first see Alice (played by the 25-year-old newcomer Emily Grace), she's already in transit, filling up her tank at a gas station. We later learn that she's driving away from her unhappy home in New Hampshire and her depressed, divorced single mother (Jane Lincoln Taylor). While on the road, Alice never calls home but does keep in contact with a girlfriend named Julie, who's already in Miami, the destination that Alice is heading for (she plans to study marine biology at the University of Miami).

On the road, Alice encounters a car full of rednecks shouting obscenities, but far from being fearful, she defiantly gives them the finger as they speed past her. Sufficiently shaken by the experience, she checks whether they're waiting for her at the next rest stop. When she returns to her car from the bathroom, she finds that one of her tires has been punctured.

It's at this point that Alice is befriended by two seeming Good Samaritans, Sandra (Judith Ivey) and Bill (Bill Raymond), a middle-aged couple traveling about in their R.V. ("everywhere it doesn't snow"). They tell Alice that they saw a rough-looking young man lurking suspiciously around her car, and at one point saw him stoop down-that could've been when he punctured her tire, Sandra and Bill suggest. Alice-who is now truly alarmed by the dangers facing her on the road-is grateful for their attention, particularly when Bill changes her tire without being asked, while the very talkative Sandra keeps trying to calm her down. Sandra suggests that she follow their R.V. on the highway, just in case she's being stalked by the man who punctured her tire. Alice agrees to follow them, but when her car completely breaks down, and the R.V. disappears up ahead, Alice is seized with panic-especially after a car stops ahead and a tall man emerges out of the dark night. She flees to the bushes on the side of the road and cowers there until she sees the R.V. returning. Bill and Sandra emerge to confront the stranger at a distance and tell him that his services aren't needed; both the stranger and Alice notice that Bill is packing a gun. The stranger departs, and Alice hesitantly accepts Sandra's offer to travel with them until she reaches her destination.

Of course, Sandra and Bill are not exactly the Samaritans they pretend to be; if they were, there would be no movie, and certainly no suspense. But who are they exactly? This is where all the nuance comes in: Alice isn't exactly what she pretends to be, either.

As Alice enters the world of R.V. families and the truck drivers who share their rest stops, she gradually realizes that Bill procures male customers for Sandra in an orderly, business-like fashion. But Bill and Sandra make no effort to recruit Alice for their "business." Rather, it is she who jumps at the chance to make more money than she's ever dreamed of in her "honest" job as a waitress.

The picture could go in so many disastrous directions from this point on, with all the characters demolished in the sleazy wreckage. A gun is flashed, a shot is fired, a great many lies are exposed, but Sandra, Bill and Alice emerge not as a newfound family exactly, nor as villains and victims, but as three ever-vulnerable human beings doing the best they can to survive.

In this extraordinary season, it seems that every other picture is blessed with what the critics herald as Oscar-worthy performances. What Alice Found may never even be seen by most of the academy's voters-alas, they'll be missing a beautifully harmonized trio of performers in Ms. Ivey, Mr. Raymond and Ms. Grace. These actors invest their beleaguered characters with the dignity, strength and resilience to live their lives of frantic desperation without surrendering to self-pity or self-hatred. And if that's not a form of heroism, I don't know what is.

Something Fishy

Tim Burton's Big Fish , from a screenplay by John August, based on the novel by Daniel Wallace, never allows its many creative cooks to spoil its tangy broth of whimsy, mythology and sweet romance. Not only is Mr. Burton at the top of his form in endowing his tallest stories and wildest magical conceits with emotional conviction, but he is aided by a superb acting ensemble that never loses its footing in the treacherous swamps of make-believe. To put a point to it, Big Fish works-for me, at least-though some viewers may decide it's gone over the top with its spectacularly Felliniesque ending (the prodigal son emotionally reunited with a father maddeningly insistent on embellishing his real-life experiences with the tallest tales he can imagine).

Mr. Wallace, a native of Alabama, set his novel in this state of rivers. The filmmakers have followed suit by shooting close to many Alabama rivers, locations that evoke the watery myths and legends of Edward Bloom. Young Edward didn't want to be a "big fish in a little pond," and thus set out for the bigger world outside his little Alabama town. The young Edward is played by Ewan McGregor, the older Edward by Albert Finney in a felicitous combination of age-differential casting for a single character. There's a similarly smooth transition in the casting of Sandra, the great love of Edward's life-Alison Lohman plays the young Sandra and Jessica Lange the older. That this love is an enduring one is movingly confirmed by exquisite expressions of romantic passion at both stages-young and old-of the life cycle. In between are all sorts of enchanting creatures, like Helena Bonham Carter's Jenny in Edward's real life and the Witch in his feverish imagination (she has the power to predict one's death from the reflection in her glass eye); Steve Buscemi's Norther Winslow, who evolves from failed poet to inept bank robber to Wall Street tycoon; Danny DeVito's Amos Calloway, an unscrupulous circus ringmaster who doubles as a werewolf on the side; and the real-life gentle giant named Karl (Matthew McGrory), who has been authenticated in the Guinness Book of Records as having the largest feet in the world: size 28.5.

Billy Crudup as Bloom's son has the hardest role in serving as the audience's surrogate skeptic over his father's surrealist exaggerations, at least at first. Feeling that he has never known his father except through his myths, he's fled to Paris, begun writing his own stories, and plans on marrying a Frenchwoman named Josephine (Marion Cotillard) who becomes the last devoted listener to her beloved father-in-law's heroic fantasies. The rivers and their legendary jumping fish are the recurring metaphors for the fluid grace of this marvelous conjunction of talents in yet another father-and-son epiphany.

London in Love

Richard Curtis' Love Actually , from his own screenplay, is a difficult film to evaluate because it's made up of so many separate stories, most of which end up being interconnected either spatially or thematically. It's as if London were peopled by one big happy family all the way up to 10 Downing Street. The British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, not only falls in love with a member of his household staff, but gets to tell off the President of the United States (Billy Bob Thornton) after he catches him making a pass at the P.M.'s secret love (Martine McCutcheon). Are we talking George Bush or Bill Clinton here? Either way, it's pure fantasy inasmuch as our real-life President gave not a crumb to the embattled prime minister on either steel tariffs or the nine British subjects detained at Guantánamo-and to make matters worse, Tony Blair didn't say boo, at least not in public.

So you get an idea of the level of hopeful fantasy from which Mr. Curtis is operating. Still, all is not sweetness and light, even in the sunny romanticism that mirrors Mr. Curtis' previous movie valentines: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), each of which he wrote or co-wrote. However, Love Actually is Mr. Curtis' first directorial assignment, and the expert timing of the various episodes reflects his long experience in television comedy with his sometime partner, Rowan Atkinson, who's given two short fuss-budget cameos for some of the laughs. Most of the giggles however, are garnered by Bill Nighy's outrageously uninhibited over-the-hill rock star.

But my favorite characters are played by Emma Thompson and Laura Linney as two uncharacteristic (for this film) losers in the game of love. Alan Rickman plays the closest thing to an unmitigated cad, one who even lacks the courage of his carnality. There is also an innocent romance between two stand-ins blocking a soft-core porn film; a big plug for the European Union in the relationship between characters played by Colin Firth (who doesn't speak a word of Portuguese) and Lúcia Moniz (who doesn't speak a word of English); and a sickly relationship between Liam Neeson's widowed stepfather and his lovesick little boy, played much too smoothly by the frighteningly mature Thomas Sangster. The film's cleverest piece of mise en scène involves Andrew Lincoln's mute courtship of his best friend's wife, played by Keira Knightly. Finally, it strikes me that Ms. Thompson here has the equally sad role played by Kristin Scott Thomas in Four Weddings and a Funeral . Funny that one remembers the sad love stories longer than the happy ones. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie until, in the end, it went somewhat bonkers with what amounted to a communal love fest on Christmas Eve. Love is actually more personal than that, don't you think?

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.