To say nothing of passive-aggressive, knee-jerkisms, those of us who weren't weaned on the idea that the box has a uh wonderful kind of negative capacity (to quote a non-existent Breillat-Allen coupling), would do well to check out the latest John Irving adaptation, Door in the Floor. Sure, there's the overly-literary bend of the title metaphor – referring to anything from latent hysteria to the dimensions of Kim Basinger's womb – but that's sort of forgiven by a final shot which compounds the abstract and real in a way that's pretty fucking unnerving.

Others may find themselves turned off by the throat-scraped sirens of middlebrowdom, complemented here by a full-bodied chorus: sexual repression, late-motherhood branded with laconic disaffection, precocious four-year old-ness run amok, and a crumbling marriage encrypted with the death of its two children. What they'd be missing, though, is a nicely calibrated look at the way first heartbreak (in this case, of Oedipal proportions) can foster casual misogyny, beginning with Marion's glassy silence in the face of Eddie's "I love you," and ending with him and Ted doing a great approximation of frat-boy pissiness at the oh-the-irony expense of Bijou Phillips' Alice. It's this sense of hurt which serves as a bullying effigy for Eddie, steering the film away from its a-summer-he'd-never-forget/coming-of-age trajectory, and coating all of his actions with a veneer of childish obstinance and lusty confusion. So, basically, messy, theatrical and probably too self-serious – but also wholly necessary, insofar it was about time we had a cultural revaluation of the whole MILF scenario.—David Levinson

» Tod Williams | USA | 2004