Joanna (Nicole Kidman of Cold Mountain) is a high-powered TV network president, whose special flare is reality shows, in all their mean-spirited, unrealistic glory. One of her shows, "I Can Do Better" pits Mike White (The School of Rock) and his wife against each other as a happily married couple on an island for a week with high-end professional prostitutes, to see if they will commit adultery. Will they resist temptation or give in because "they can do better?" Let’s just say that the end result finds Joanna looking down a gun barrel…and then out of a job.

With this turn of events Joanna and her husband Walt (Matthew Broderick of You Can Count on Me), who works in her shadow at the same studio, along with their two children, relocate to the idyllic suburb of Stepford, Connecticut. The set up on this is somewhat like Cold Creek Manor, with Sharon Stone and Dennis Quaid, who get fed up with NYC and move to the country where life is supposed to be so much less cutthroat. Both scenarios find high-powered, high profile women with their lives in jeopardy. Hey, do we detect a pattern here?

The houses in the gated community of Stepford are luxurious, and the women who occupy them are a little too cookie cutter friendly in both actions and appearance. Notice, we did not say the women "live" in the houses, for they all seem to not have minds of their own, other than Bobbi (Bette Midler of What Women Want) and Claire (Glenn Close of Cookie’s Fortune.. republish 20031q). Bobbi is a cranky, sarcastic, writer, and she and Joanna recognize they are kindred spirits. Claire, like the other wives of Stepford, is on auto pilot, subservient to her husband ¾ except we sense she clearly is a manipulator with an agenda. Glenn Close could be more frightful than her role in Fatal Attraction, if her character, and the others, as well as the script, didn’t fall apart about 20 minutes into the film.

When one of the Stepford wives has a seizure at a 4^th of July celebration, Joanna knows that something is strange when the woman short circuits and starts "sparking." As Joanna becomes more suspicious of her surroundings, Walter starts to embrace the life of his staid men’s club headed by Claire’s husband Mike (the indomitable Christopher Walken of Man on Fire).

George’s Take: For a movie about an idyllic town where things are not as they appear rent Dogville. Ironically, it also stars Nicole Kidman and it’s a brilliant film.