Boy walks down the street. Girl walks toward him from the other direction. Their eyes meet, they stop on opposite sides of an intersection… and wham, she's hit by a cab. And so it goes in Closer, Mike Nichols' adaptation of Patrick Marber's play about strangers who literally meet by accident, then do horrible things to each other on purpose.

    Closer's four characters are interconnected via Dan, an obituary writer played by the ubiquitous Jude Law. Dan is dating waitress/stripper Alice (Natalie Portman) but falls for photographer Anna (Julia Roberts). Anna is married to Larry (Clive Owen), whom Dan inadvertently set her up with in a dirty chat-session prank. The foursome come together, split and pair off again in different combinations. We're in England, but it all seems so very French.

    All four have familiar flaws: Dan is a self-absorbed, failed writer who has taken Alice's life story as the basis of his novel; darkly brooding Dr. Larry verges on malevolence; Anna's a prize flake who bounces back and forth between the two men. As for daffy little Alice — well, she's got more going on than you'd think. Bruised and abandoned by Dan in one scene, she's a sasspot stripper teasing and tormenting Larry in another. (Although, a warning for flesh fans: Portman requested the nudity be removed from the film.)

    Casting movie stars of this caliber often makes it difficult to separate their real-life personae from those on-screen (this means you, Julia), but director Mike Nichols gets the best out of each, just as the film itself focuses on the juciest bits of each relationship: the flush of the first meeting, the disastrous end. Time skips forward in months and years, avoiding the draggy middle stuff no one remembers anyway.

    In one scene, Larry learns that his new bride Anna has been having an affair with Dan for the past year. He masochistically goads Anna into comparing her two men. Anyone who's been cuckolded will recognize this conversation. In the end, Closer isn't really about which girl ends up with which boy, but a hard look at how much of ourselves we're willing to reveal to strangers. — Lily Oei

Hearing a bump in the night, Hepburn tosses on a couture dressing gown
and sneaks, lightfooted, down the stairs. Standing on the staircase, she
spies his shadow — suspecting he's a thief — and pries a cartoonish antique
pistol from the wall. She takes a few steps down, points the gun, and
sees, in her living room, Peter O'Toole, more dashing than 007, in a drop-dead-gorgeous
tuxedo. Hepburn is instantly smitten, as anyone would be. So she shoots
him ("It's only a flesh wound," she says). Soon, she's
yanking on a big pair of heavy black boots under her dressing gown, and
headed out the door in a lovestruck daze, escorting
the handsome stranger back to his hotel.

   

The decades have cast a kind of cutesy patina over Hepburn, but I
love her for moments like these — in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Love
in the Afternoon, Charade, and so many others — when her
character seems like the most innocent and openhearted gal you've
ever
seen, and then, slyly, goes looking for trouble. — Logan
Hill