Hollywood film crew invades a sleepy little burg in rural Vermont. (The watchword on the streets is "Go you Huskies!") Make no mistake. The real invader, merciless as any Martian body snatcher, is writer-director David Mamet, who compels all his characters, natives and aliens alike, to speak his own secret language, with its Pinteresque rhythms, repetitions, subtle variations. Some of the players (most notably that natural-born funnyman, William H. Macy) speak it better than others. Yet the ship-in-a-bottle precision of Mamet's craftsmanship comes through regardless. Maybe all the more so when an actor fumbles and stumbles. Mamet dishes out plenty of waspish comments on the filmmaking fraternity ("What's an Associate Producer credit?" "It's what you give to your secretary instead of a raise"), though the tone remains coldbloodedly breezy even in the vicinity of statutory rape and its cover-up. Rebecca Pidgeon and Philip Seymour Hoffman make a sweet romantic couple, as, respectively, the local amateur-theater activist and the high-principled visiting scriptwriter (a natural point of identification for Mamet, all the way to his smittenness with Rebecca Pidgeon). Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Julia Stiles, Clark Gregg, Charles Durning, Patti LuPone, David Paymer. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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