Sumptuously photographed (by Andrzej Sekula), but otherwise a big step backward for writer-director David Mamet -- back to one of his stage plays in preference to a screen original, a two-character piece to do with the balance of power in academe, and the tipping of that balance by one student's charge of sexual harassment against her teacher (stimulatingly debatable), and even of rape (patently and undercuttingly untrue). Both of them speak the same language, a stylized arrhythmic pattycake of repetitions, interruptions, halting continuations: "The stoics say --" "The stoics?" "The stoical philosophers say ..." or "Then what would transpire?" "Transpire?" "Yes." "Happen?" "Yes." Mamet-speak, in other words. And more ear-irritating than thought-provoking. William H. Macy, Debra Eisenstadt. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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