Altman-esque ensemble piece co-written and co-directed by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming, who, in addition, play a newly reunited Hollywood couple, a fading star (Leigh looking more like her father, Vic Morrow, with each passing year) and a sexually ambivalent British novelist and novice film director. Real-life mates Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, fictionalized as a recent Oscar recipient for Best Actor and a retired actress turned housewife (as opposed, in reality, to long ago for Supporting Actor and merely semi-retired), show up at the party with their two real children in tow. Jane Adams, looking as if she's in Day 54 of a hunger strike ("I've been taking pills to get my weight down since the baby"), makes a big splash as a total neurotic -- so big a one that even when she's off screen you wonder why you're not still getting wet. The next-door neighbors (Denis O'Hare and Mina Badie), with whom the anniversary couple have been engaged in a running feud over their dogs (Otis and Anouk, as themselves), are included on the guest list. Parker Posey is there as well, along with John C. Reilly, a radiant Jennifer Beals, a wan Gwyneth Paltrow -- and during the slow spots you can chew on such pertinent questions as why Beals has not had more of a career and why Paltrow has had so much of a one. This exercise in Hollywood self-absorption, with a built-in alibi for displays of phoniness and theatricality, is entertaining more for its random pitiless offhand observations than for its inexorable climb toward emotional flareups, psychological revelations, personal tragedies, stagy fireworks. Through it all, the one constant is the scummy, ashen, face-powdery veneer of the digital-video image. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd