In the Cut

Most of the advance publicity on this film focused on Meg Ryan’s bizarrely collagen-enhanced fish-lips and the fact that there’s a scene of a man orally pleasuring her. Yawn on both counts, but otherwise, this is a decent, if slow moving, film noir. The camera work is excellent, with a constantly drifting camera that catches the uncertainty of Ryan’s character as she mediates between her roles as prim schoolteacher and slutty cop-lover. Mark Ruffalo is excellent as the cop who falls in love with Ryan while investigating a grisly murder, and Kevin Bacon is interesting as a neurotic stalker who cries a lot. Ultimately, the film is marred by some embarrassingly awful dialogue, but it’s still worthwhile as an attempt to transplant a 1940s police detective into a 21st-century murder case.