A full recital of misgivings about the casting would run the risk of descending to John Simon-esque rudeness. Let it suffice that John Malkovich is not altogether persuasive in the part of an infamous and irresistible roué that Michelle Pfeiffer is only slightly more persuasive as the demure embodiment of Christian rectitude; and that Glenn Close is least persuasive of all as a sufficiently charming and tantalizing prize for which the aforesaid roué will endure an amorous challenge of the dimensions of a Labor of Hercules: bullying and intimidating, sure; charming and tantalizing, never. All three are crowded with oppressive closeups for the purpose of appreciating facial expressions that would still be writ too large through the wrong end of a telescope: exhibitionistic, self-delighted, unsubtly subtle, stroboscopically nuanced, technically polished to a high and eye-fatiguing shine. Still, the plot alone, a plot about plotters, is sufficiently horrifically fascinating to sustain interest even if you've already read the Choderlos de Laclos novel, and would still be sufficiently and horrifically so if it were acted with the expressiveness of chess pieces. But yet again: if there were any truly compelling reason to do a dramatization of this novel (written in the archaic but perfectly suited form of letters between the characters), then Roger Vadim would already have taken care of it when he updated the story in a 1959 screen treatment (smartly cast, by the way, with Jeanne Moreau, Gerard Philipe, and a vacuous post-Bardot starlet in the key roles). That was the difficult, the worthwhile thing to do: to revivify the story, not just reiterate it. The present version, under British director Stephen Frears, does little more than refocus the spyglass, or paparazzo's zoom lens, from a safe historical distance and under the same cultural sanction as Masterpiece Theatre. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd