Opens Fri Oct 22.
In A Double Life, an unbalanced stage actor played by Ronald Colman becomes so obsessed with the role of Othello that he ends up actually murdering his treacherous Desdemona on stage. Director George Cukor frames Colman's descent into thespianic dementia by endlessly repeating scenes of the actors performing Shakespeare's play, until, through the magic power of acting, they seem to "become" his characters. Stage Beauty, directed by Richard Eyre, shares a central gimmick (multiple repetitions of the murder scene from Othello) with A Double Life, but the new film's perspective on the art of acting is almost exactly the opposite of its predecessor's.

Stage Beauty takes place at the dawn of the Restoration, when, for the first time in history, females were allowed to perform on stage, thus displacing all the men who had been groomed (literally) to play female roles in the theater. The incomparable Billy Crudup plays the most glamorous and celebrated actor-ess of his day, who suddenly finds himself upstaged (literally) by his lady dresser, Claire Danes, and cast (figuratively) out of polite society, an actor whose rigorous training is suddenly made obsolete by the whims of progress. Having faded from star to relic in a single season, Crudup's Ned Kynaston must then summon up the balls (literally and figuratively) to change from Desdemona to Othello, when he knows he was meant to play the former. It's a very particular dilemma, and one that calls up many troubling--and unconvincing--conclusions about the nature of masculinity. The film surrounding these conclusions, however, is pleasing because of (what else?) the actors. SEAN NELSON

Vera Drake

dir. Mike Leigh

Opens Fri Oct 22.
Mike Leigh's best movie since Secrets & Lies is an overwhelming miasma of hope and horror, conviction and contravening authority. I would call it brilliant, but the entire film is shrouded in a gray 1950 London haze. Vera Drake doesn't sparkle. She gleams.

The title character, played with impossible pathos and naiveté by Imelda Staunton, is a housekeeper, mother, visitor of shut-ins, and part-time abortionist. She is paid for polishing fireplace grates in rich people's homes, but the latter three functions--feeding and clothing her family of four, putting the kettle on in the cramped flats of various invalids, and pumping the uteruses of troubled women full of a noxious solution of carbolic soap--she performs gratis. She's cheery and energetic as she goes about her work, and her family, all of whom are in the dark about her unlawful para-medical dealings, dotes on her.

Leigh excels at bringing out the shading and highlights in a family portrait, and Vera's family is no exception. Her son (Daniel Mays), with his long limbs, dandified manner, and slightly curled lip, fairly bursts out of his parents' tiny quarters, while her diffident and possibly dim daughter (the superb Alex Kelly) seems to shrink into any available corner. The tiny kernels of their disparate reactions to their mother's eventual arrest and trial are in evidence even in their very first scene together.

When the inevitable crisis occurs, the movie dives into a misery as bleak and painful as anything I've ever seen on film. The narrative is clearly engaged in modern political struggles, but at the same time it's a bruising, classical tragedy about a woman whose passionate altruism brings pain and suffering upon herself and the people whom she loves. ANNIE WAGNER

Being Julia

dir. István Szabó

Opens Oct 22.
Being Julia is an irritating star vehicle about an irritating star named Julia Lambert. Julia (Annette Bening) is the cash cow of London's West End in the late '30s, but she's suffering from a severe bout of ennui. As the film opens, she pleads with her smothering producer and her distant husband/manager that the run of her current show be curtailed so that she can take a vacation. We are treated several times to the closing lines of dialogue in this mannered abomination, and it's not hard to see why she'd want to flee; the whoosh of the heavy curtains closing sounds each time as though the stage itself were heaving a disgusted sigh.

But an unexpected (and unconvincing) offstage love affair with a boy who is named after both a tomcat and a vegetable turns her resolve inside out. Suddenly Julia loves the theater again! Then Tom Fennell (Shaun Evans) gets restless, and all at once Julia can no longer act. Annette Bening throws herself into each dizzying emotion with abandon, but the histrionics are so grossly out of proportion with the charm or threat posed by Evans that the emotional center of the film is hollowed out. The end is smashingly entertaining, but I'm not so sure it makes the tedious, feature-length setup worthwhile. ANNIE WAGNER

The Grudge

dir. Takashi Shimizu

Opens Fri Oct 22.
The Grudge is based on a Japanese film of the same name, is directed by the same director as the original, and is set in the same city, Tokyo. The remake, however, replaces several central Japanese roles with American ones. The plot is basic: A young American nurse (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who is living with her boyfriend, is assigned to take care of an old, bedridden American woman who lives in a haunted house that she and her son have just moved into. The house is haunted because three years before a woman and her son were brutally murdered by her husband. The killings activated an evil black hole that sucks every living thing it encounters into a vortex of eerie noises and, ultimately, violent death. Nothing survives its force, not even the Japanese detective who doesn't really attempt to solve the mystery but recognizes what is going on and, with deep melancholy, anticipates the worst that is coming his way.

The problem with The Grudge is that the ghost never rests. You want a moment to look at Tokyo, to observe its traffic, its bright shops and busy bars--but that pleasure must be found in another movie (see Lost In Translation), because before the setting cools into the normal rhythms of urban life, yet another victim is being pursued and devoured. The ghost in The Grudge is to horror films what Ebola is to pathology. CHARLES MUDEDE