A sexual-harassment horror story, single-minded if not simple-minded, set in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes, Not Quite That Many Hideous Open-Pit Craters, Two Dead Stags Strapped to a Flatbed, and Untold Chauvinist Pigs. (The soundtrack, a tad predictably, makes use of several songs by that native son of Hibbing, Mn., Bob Dylan.) The fictionalized mining company of Pearson Taconite and Steel, Inc., had hired its first female miner, we are informed, in 1975, and fourteen years later, when the narrative picks up, against an eventual backdrop of Anita Hill testifying on television at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, the women are still outnumbered thirty to one. Charlize Theron, over the objections of her miner father ("You wanna be a lesbian now?") and in the face of open hostility from the male majority, joins the band of sisters, a single mother of two (by different fathers), a fugitive battered wife, and a closet Amazon who will not heed the advice to "work hard, keep your mouth shut, and take it like a man." The American debut of New Zealand director Niki Caro (Whale Rider, an aperitif of prepubertal feminism) is in essence a Lifetime Network movie with more grit: you don't hear the four-letter "c" word on Lifetime, and you don't see shots of smeared feces and sprayed semen. In addition to more grit, it boasts a strong cast, aside from the sometimes over-the-top Theron (whose ferocity can come as no surprise after Monster), including two of America's supreme actresses, Frances McDormand, doing a toned-down version of her Fargo accent, and Sissy Spacek, plus Michelle Monaghan, Richard Jenkins, Jeremy Renner, Sean Bean, Woody Harrelson. (But if the story demanded flashbacks to high school with a different actress in the central role, couldn't she at least have been equipped with a false mole on her throat to match Theron's?) It boasts, as well, a couple of eruptions of real showmanship, as effective as they are manipulative: the father's change of allegiance at a combative union meeting; and the spontaneous rallying, one person at a time, to the side of the besieged heroine in the courtroom. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd