Peter Bogdanovich's "comeback" -- meaning that the director of The Last Picture Show, etc., has come back from the TV-movie wasteland, if not necessarily that he has come back very far. A cramped and scrimping stage adaptation (written for the screen by the original playwright, Steven Peros), it chews over a "sexy" theory on the mysterious death in 1924 of silent-film pioneer Thomas H. Ince, birthday-boy guest of honor aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst, along with Charlie Chaplin, the chatty-catty novelist Elinor Glyn (all the best lines: "Charlie is only capable of a monogamous relationship with his own movies"), the fledgling newspaper columnist Louella Parsons, and of course Hearst's mistress and protégée, Marion Davies. The theory, in opposition to the official verdict of heart failure as a result of acute gastritis, has it that he was shot to death by the jealous Hearst, a scenario made "sexier" than other, similar theories by the added suggestion that Hearst was actually gunning for someone the average modern-day moviegoer will have heard of: Chaplin. Bogdanovich, a cinephile second to none, and a sponge for pertinent anecdotes and apocrypha, might like to think that with this Hollywood Babylon-ian piece of gossip he is walking in the footsteps of, or possibly shoulder to shoulder with, one of his idols, Orson Welles, who had taken on Hearst pseudonymously in Citizen Kane. One big difference is that, pseudonym apart, Welles was taking him on at the peak of his power while Bogdanovich is taking him on after half a century of horizontality: a superfluous shovelful of dirt on his grave. The dark, mausoleum-like sets and the dimly lit photography conspire to swallow up the lusterless cast: Kirsten Dunst, Edward Herrmann, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, Joanna Lumley, Jennifer Tilly. Gloom envelops them like an offshore fog. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd