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Six-and-a-half years prior to the film's main action, for reasons even he doesn't understand, Ben started systematically and intentionally ruining his life. His prolonged orgy of self-destruction was triggered by possibly catastrophic medical news. I say "possibly" because Ben never even learned what, if anything, was wrong with his health. In the film's prologue, a doctor tells him, "I don't love your EKG" – a wonderfully smarmy preface to everyone's worst nightmare – and he flees the office rather than hear the details.

The movie picks up with Ben, now divorced from his wife, Nancy (Susan Sarandon), living a pathetic shadow of his former life. He still carries himself like a Master of the Universe (and think of how much more watchable "The Bonfire of the Vanities" would have been had Douglas played Sherman McCoy), but the more time we spend with him, the more we realize that Ben's aura of imperviousness is just a performance. Ben's chronic infidelity destroyed his marriage, and at age 60, his capacity for talking much younger women into bed seems less a gift than a manifestation of his deep immaturity, depression and fear of death. (It's not the women he's after, it's his own rosy memories of youthful potency, and he doesn't seduce these women with sheer charm, but by choosing targets that have daddy issues and exploiting them.)

Ben lost his string of car dealerships in a stupid criminal scam. He's living beyond his means and has to keep borrowing money from the handful of people he hasn't completely alienated. One of them is his 30-something daughter, Susan (Jenna Fischer), who wants the old man to be a decent grandfather to her son, Scotty (Jake Siciliano), and knows he has it in him. But Ben takes advantage of her good nature, and his grandson's, too. The sequence in which Ben shows up late for Scotty's birthday party -- loping toward the family car as it's being loaded up, and grinning as if his belated presence is the greatest gift of all -- is every parent or grandparent's nightmare of fraudulence and inadequacy packed into one agonizing moment. (The only similar scene that's half as devastating is the bit in Clint Eastwood's "True Crime" in which the workaholic hero packs his preschool-age daughter into a stroller and pushes her through a zoo at breakneck pace so that he can get back to the office faster, and convinces the poor girl it's a marvelous experience by calling it "speed zoo.")

If Ben's magnificent ruin of a life weren't so astutely observed -- and if Douglas didn't let you see every flicker of vanity, delusion, arrogance, introspection and shame that passes through the character's mind -- Ben's plight and the movie would be unbearable. But writer-director Brian Koppleman and his co-director, David Levien (they co-wrote the scripts for "Rounders" and "Oceans 13"), hit the right tone early -- empathetic yet brutally honest -- and Douglas' absorbing, minutely detailed performance sustains it. (He's given Ben some distinctive verbal and physical tics -- such as the aggressive, borderline-violent way he jabs people when he's trying to sell them something, and getting excited by the act of selling -- but he never highlights them, much less demands that we appreciate their cleverness. They're subtle, and feel tossed-off.) "Solitary Man" is as warm as a comedy about a screw-up can be without resorting to special pleading. The film never asks us to rationalize Ben's awesome selfishness; remember, he didn't receive a frightening diagnosis, he deliberately avoided receiving it, as if he wanted an excuse to act out anyway and didn't want to complicate the process by dealing in facts.

The script is careful to distinguish between Ben's view of himself and the movie's view of Ben -- an important difference that too many films about charismatic, badly behaved characters either fail to delineate or purposefully fudge. The most revelatory scenes in the movie are the ones in which Ben's friends and relatives puncture his delusion that his self-absorbed way of life is a highly evolved, uncommonly brave kind of individualism, and that anyone who doesn't live that way is a philistine or a coward. Following an ill-advised one-night stand with one of his daughter's friends, Ben practically drives the poor woman from his bed with his needling, insensitive observations, then defends his behavior by saying that he just decided one day to say whatever popped into his head and anyone that couldn't handle it could hit the bricks. (The world contains many varieties of asshole, but the very worst is the kind that's rebranded himself a righteous truth-teller.)

The supporting characters aren't just there to absorb his punishment. They're representatives of value systems – some close to Ben's, others thankfully far removed. As played by Sarandon, Ben's ex-wife isn't a doormat; she's a loving woman who barely recognizes the man she married and wishes that man would return but knows it'll happen slowly, if at all. Jenna Fischer's Susan is still in thrall to her father; from the way that he regales her with inappropriate details of his love life, one surmises Ben once presented himself as less of a father to her than a best friend who happened to share half her DNA. Now Susan is more mature than he is -- more evolved. It pains him to be reminded of this, just as it hurts when younger women who initially seem intrigued by his randy energy hear him addressed as "Grandpa" and flash that condescending, "Aren't you cute?" smile.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Ben's sexy, slightly brittle girlfriend Jordon (the always remarkable Mary-Louise Parker, letting you know who her character is just by the way she holds a glass or folds her legs under herself on a couch). She's the lover Ben deserves, a cool materialist, bruised by life and cynical about everything. Her teenage daughter, Allyson (Imogene Poots), is a younger, female version of Ben -- not soulless yet, but getting there. Their inevitable, "Are they going to go there? Dear God, they went there" tryst during a college campus visit would be revolting if both characters hadn't been established as cheerful heels, and if Allyson's rope-a-dope approach to seduction wasn't so clearly in the tradition of Michael Douglas movies about men who think with the wrong head. And when Allyson shares the same frame with her and Ben's campus guide, a likable, kindhearted boy named Daniel Cheston (Jesse Eisenberg, who has the second most expressive stammer in movies, after Jeff Goldblum), the visual and moral contrast is so stark that it almost amounts to a sight gag.

Towering above (or is that sinking beneath?) the rest is Douglas, maybe the last remaining link to an era when actors could play characters that were interesting rather than likable and still appear in big movies. He's at his best playing human steamrollers undone by hubris or unexamined illusions (sometimes both). The power-mad corporate raider Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street"; the impulsively cheating husband in "Fatal Attraction"; the newly divorced man in "War of the Roses" who holds onto his dreams of a perfect marriage by refusing to give up his stake in the family house; the super-macho police detective undone by his animal cravings in "Basic Instinct"; the laid-off angry white man rampaging through a multicultural Los Angeles in "Falling Down"; the aging, one-hit wonder novelist in "Wonder Boys," self-medicating his depression with pot and nostalgia: To one degree or another these characters are all opportunists, screw-ups or some combination. And there's not a saint among them.

Douglas is a '70s-style antihero whose star rose a decade late. In a decade-plus of American film defined by Rocky, Rambo, "Top Gun" and umpteen films staring Arnold Schwarzenegger and his guns, Douglas insisted on playing recognizable men who lived in something vaguely resembling the real world. Even during the peak of Douglas' fame (roughly 1985 to '95) you never caught him being photographed with Vaseline on the lens, like Warren Beatty in that godforsaken remake of "An Affair to Remember" or Robert Redford in, well, everything post-"Brubaker." (He's more a Jack Nicholson type of performer, but without Jack's tendency to go cartoonishly over-the-top.) He didn't act opposite robots or space creatures or spend a lot of screen time leaping into the air unloading handguns. (One notable exception is Ridley Scott's glossy-trashy, America-vs.-Japan thriller “Black Rain." But even there Douglas managed to make a standard-issued, ass-kicking Yankee cop seem human-scaled -- socially inept and insecure, a prisoner of machismo.) Even when his characters are misunderstood or persecuted, the actor never models a halo. In the ludicrous conversation piece "Disclosure," in which Douglas' character is sexually harassed by Demi Moore's ruthless Amazon boss, the actor makes sure we know his character is still a sinner, even if he's being sinned against, and he's not smart enough to see the larger puzzle of which his torment is one small piece.

Douglas' characters are always guilty of something. When D-Fens, the hero of "Falling Down," finally has his epiphany on a dock, it's phrased as a question: "I'm the bad guy?" Douglas' most memorable characters could all pose that question to the audience, and by all rights the response should be the same: Yes, absolutely – and don't go changing. 

But while another man might have an affair with his aide or get unseemly hair plugs, Shrek is, after all, a denizen of Far Far Away. So, instead, he finds himself in the lair of that most notorious wheeler-dealer -- Rumpelstiltskin. And faster than he can say, "I should really have my lawyer go over this," he's signed the world's crappiest contract, buying one day of carefree ogre mongering in exchange for one forgotten day of his life. Unfortunately for Shrek, Rumpelstiltskin chooses the day he was born, thereby negating his entire existence. And it turns out that a world without Shrek is a bleak, Rumplestiltskin-ruled place. Holy "It's a Wonderful Life"!

Will Shrek make things right via a true love-based loophole before he's obliterated entirely? Can he change the sorry destinies of his beloved Fiona and his friends Donkey and Puss in Boots? Can he butch up and appreciate how much he already has before it's gone?

After an uninspired middle period, the "Shrek" series has, like the revitalized character himself, roared back to form. Like last year's "Up," this isn't merely a cute kid's movie with funny one-liners and adorable critters. It's a soulful meditation on the age-old question: Is that all there is?

And while Shrek himself, once again deftly voiced by the better-heard-and-not-seen Mike Meyers, wrestles angst with aplomb, it's Fiona (Cameron Diaz) who emerges as the true hero of this installment. With no Shrek to save her, the cursed princess of the first film becomes an ogre warrior, fighting to save her people from the scourge of Rumpelstiltskin and his army of witches. But this Fiona isn't simply a badass -- she's a lonely, painfully embittered girl who's spent most of her life trapped in a tower. Diaz, a vastly underrated actress, has a natural affinity for the complexity of Fiona and gives her character both a warm maternal spark and a flinty protective shell. "I saved myself," she tells Shrek, making it sound less like a declaration of strength than an admission of pure, tormented isolation.

Bringing up the comic relief rear are Antonio Banderas as a now pampered, out-of-shape Puss in Boots and Eddie Murphy as the perpetually slow on the uptake Donkey, amazed that he's a dragon's babydaddy in an alternative reality. ("Are my kids cute, or do they just make people uncomfortable?" he muses.) The hastily put together 3-D effects rarely wow, but that's hardly the point. The movie's strength isn't in characters leaping off the screen, it's in Shrek's anguished, George Bailey-like desperation to get back to a world where his children exist.

But will kids buy into all these adult crises? Not to fear -- there's still plenty of action, music and cheap gags. "Shrek" remains, first and foremost, a lively, family-friendly epic about a world of puppet boys and Pied Pipers. That it's also a touching reminder to parents that a diaper-changing, sleep-deprived life can, magically, be the happiest ever after is just icing on the gingerbread.

The prevailing opinion, to the extent there is one, is that "Troll 2" is one of the worst movies ever made, a backhanded encomium that puts it in the company of "Plan 9," "Manos: The Hands of Fate," and more recent candidates "The Room" and "Birdemic." Like those movies -- and unlike, say, "The Hottie & the Nottie" -- "Troll 2" has developed a dedicated cult following of fans who prize its stilted dialogue, glazed-over acting and Z-grade effects, and have made minor celebrities of its stars.

Michael Paul Stephenson thought he'd gotten his big break when he was cast as "Troll 2's" juvenile lead, a freckle-faced moppet whose deceased grandfather returns to warn him of the existence of malevolent goblins intent on devouring him and his family. Instead, he found himself at the center of a straight-to-video stillbirth so wretched that he would literally run from the room when it turned up on HBO. And in 1991, low-rent filler like "Troll 2" turned up a lot.

Fifteen years later, Stephenson started hearing from fans of the movie, as did dental practitioner George Hardy, who played his father. Messages popped up on Stephenson's MySpace page with increasing regularity, and an intrepid radio reporter tracked Hardy down via the American Dental Association. Stephenson's documentary "Best Worst Movie," which opens in New York this week and will travel around the country through the month of July, picks up the story from there, tracking the ever-growing cult of "Troll 2" from home-grown viewing parties to sold-out screenings in New York, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. What began as a spontaneous phenomenon, spurred on by trash-cinema connoisseurs, savvy video-store clerks and the movie's perch atop the IMDb's Bottom 100, grows large enough to suck in most of its cast members. Even Italian director Claudio Fragasso returns to the States with the understanding that his long-forgotten film has at last found an audience, only to be taken aback by the tenor of their appreciation. "People laugh at the funny things," he says after his first screening, "but they also laugh at the less funny things."

"Troll 2" offers plenty to laugh at, intentionally funny and (especially) otherwise. Start with the fact that, title notwithstanding, the movie contains precisely zero trolls, and has nothing at all to do with its ostensible prequel. Or that the goblins -- there are, at least, plenty of them -- are vegetarians, and in order to eat people they must first convince them to eat green-tinged food that turns them into human-plant hybrids. Care to see an ear of corn used as an instrument of seduction? Step right this way.

What distinguishes "Troll 2" and its ignominious ilk from run-of-the-mill failures is the sheer scale of their awfulness, a level of misconception and malexecution so profound that it inspires a perverse kind of awe. Anyone can make crap, but the proverbial horde of monkeys tapping away at their infinite typewriters might well produce "Hamlet" before they came up with this soiled pearl, from the opening of "Plan 9 From Outer Space": "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future." You could scour acting classes across the country and never find performances as slack-jawed and zombified as those in "Troll 2."

"The fundamental, I guess, magic with movies like 'Troll 2' is that they're honest and they're genuine and they're sincere," Stephenson said in New York this week. "'Troll 2' is the perfect example of everyone putting their heart out on the line and trying their best with such sincere intentions, and then failing in every imaginable and unimaginable way."

While you might assume "Troll 2" aficionados are sarcasm-drenched hipsters in search of a cinematic Blues Hammer, "Best Worst Movie" makes the case that their appreciation is far less convoluted. "It's genuine," says Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, programmer of the Midnites for Maniacs series at San Francisco's Castro Theatre. "There's no irony going on." Caitlin Crowley of Cambridge's Brattle Theatre says that to fail to appreciate "Troll 2," "you've got to, like, not have a heart or something."

What's striking about the fans' enthusiasm is how unironic it is. It's as if the movie's lack of self-consciousness allows them to shed their own. Rather than sneering at "Troll 2's" failure, they replicate its goofiest excesses, proudly sporting T-shirts emblazoned with the name of the goblins' home base, Nilbog, and whipping up food with the telltale electric green hue of the goblins' poisoned treats. It's the movie's very incompleteness that allows them to fill in the blanks. Ersatz bombs like "Snakes on a Plane" can never achieve the blissful idiocy of the truly superbad. (In that case, the creativity of the fans' responses far outstripped that of the movie itself.) As Susan Sontag wrote in "Notes on 'Camp,'" "Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying." "Troll 2" still lingers in the IMDb's Bottom 100, albeit at a more respectable/less remarkable 59. But now the one-star reviews are balanced by a handful of 10-star notices, and even the pans are tinged with glee.

Stephenson recalls nervously attending his first screening, wondering, "Are people going to boo and say we suck and throw tomatoes at us?" Instead, he says, he found people "enjoying 'Troll 2' in a way that I've never seen people enjoy a movie. I look back on the whole thing now and I can't honestly tell you that 'Troll 2' is a bad movie. I don't know if I believe in guilty pleasures. It's one of those things: You either like it or you don't. The reasons why people like it, that's kind of a non-issue."

There is, however, a dark side. The very guilelessness that fans of the superbad treasure means that someone, somewhere, has to be the butt of the joke. No matter how wholeheartedly Ed Wood's fans embrace the deranged aesthetics of "Plan 9" and "Glen or Glenda," there's still an ineradicable tinge of condescension. (Put it this way: If Tim Burton admires Wood's singular idiosyncrasy as much as his 1994 biopic would have us believe, why have Burton's subsequent films increasingly tended toward faceless hackwork?) It boggles the mind to think that, so many years later, Fragasso still maintains that "Troll 2" is "a film that examines important issues, like eating, living and dying." But it's also hard not to sympathize when he attacks the actors at a convention appearance blithely recounting stories from the film's disastrous production. Fragasso's sincerity makes the cult of "Troll 2" possible, but it also prevents him from joining in the fun.

In recent years, the auteurs of superbad cinema have attempted to climb onto their own bandwagon. Tommy Wiseau, whose slurred, lurching performance in "The Room" qualifies him as the Marlon Brando of trash, sold out Manhattan's 1,200-seat Ziegfeld Theatre earlier this month, turning a tidy profit off a 10-minute Q&A. James Nguyen's awesomely crude "Birdemic" uses its risibility as a marketing tool. The movie's trailer (far more professionally assembled than the film itself) is mainly devoted to night-vision footage of audiences doubling over with laughter. Nguyen didn't set out to make a seventh-rate rip-off of "The Birds" with special effects that look as if they were created on a Commodore 64, but if promoting it as such gets audiences in the door, he seems happy to roll with it.

Although Claudio Fragasso's abrasive personality makes for some of "Best Worst Movie's" more uncomfortable moments, Stephenson says that the more he watches the documentary, the more he comes around to the director's point of view. "Claudio's point makes the most sense to me," he says. "At the end of the day, whether you laugh or it makes you cry or it scares you, the most important thing is that a movie moves you. Think of how many films with greater resources, greater stars, greater talent, are forgotten about almost the instant they're done being made."

Sam Adams is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Onion A.V. Club, and a contributing editor at Philadelphia City Paper, where he edited the film section from 1999 to 2007. His writing has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, the Boston Globe, the Hollywood Reporter, Film Comment, and the National Society of Film Critics anthology, The B-List. He blogs at Breaking the Line and tweets as @SamuelAAdams.

In contrast, "Letters" gives us the radiant Amanda Seyfried as Sophie, an aspiring writer who does not need to be taken down a peg. On vacation in Verona with her restaurateur fiancé Victor (Gael García Bernal), Sophie discovers a 50-year-old letter to Shakespeare's tragic heroine nestled in the city's famous romantic wailing wall -- and impulsively replies. What follows are two sweetly engaging romances -- the quest of British pensioner Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) to reunite with her long-lost soul mate, and her uptight grandson and chaperone Charlie's (Christopher Egan) blossoming affection for would-be cupid Sophie.

"Bride Wars" director Gary Winick isn't exactly reinventing the form here -- "Letters" will hardly go down as the funniest or sharpest caper of the year. And I confess I had a hell of a time getting past the conceit that the sexy, exuberant, feeds-his-girlfriend-delicious-cheese Gael García Bernal is somehow supposed to not be the leading man here. (Note to Hollywood: If you made a movie just about Gael García Bernal and cheese, it'd do better than "Avatar.") Are we really supposed to believe Sophie would lose her heart to the relentlessly bland Egan, a performer my screening room companion noted "doesn't look like he has pubes"?

None of that matters much, however, because of the abundant chemistry between the film's two female leads, Seyfried and Redgrave. With her saucer-size eyes and winningly warm persona, Seyfried has the charisma of "Pretty Woman"-era Julia Roberts. Romantic convention dictates she initially play it frosty with Egan, but Seyfried compensates by turning her considerable wattage on the rest of the cast. Bounding around Tuscany, she's an open, adventurous girl searching for another woman's true love because she knows she hasn't found her own yet -- and not just in the form of a man. Sophie seeks creative inspiration, and something else -- a mother figure to replace the parent who abandoned her. Enter the impossibly beautiful 73-year-old Redgrave, who takes the most ethereal of scripts and infuses her character with abundant heartache, longing and hope. The movie ostensibly may be about Claire and Sophie's love affairs, but a quiet scene of Redgrave (whose character has lost a child) tenderly brushing Seyfried's hair delivers its greatest emotional wallop.

To say that "Letters to Juliet" is the best romantic comedy in a long time is, more than anything, a testament to how hateful so many Hollywood movies are. ("Leap Year," anyone?) There's just something about seeing two truly terrific actresses of different generations, playing women who aren't bitchy, that feels like getting a load of venom sucked out of one's veins. And it doesn't hurt that director Winick understands that a movie set in Tuscany should spend as much time possible showing off the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of the landscape. It may not be a great film, but for moviegoers, "Letters to Juliet" is like that long buried missive of its title -- a hopeful sign that when we hold out for good things, our patience is sometimes rewarded.

Amazingly, for 79 minutes and change, a couple of hundred paying customers in one of the world's least patient cities gave "Babies" their undivided attention.

A quick survey of friends in other states who also saw "Babies" over the weekend -- to the tune of a respectable $1.5 million the same weekend as the blitzkrieg of "Iron Man 2" -- confirmed this was not an isolated response. People are riveted by this movie in a way that they most assuredly would not be riveted by real-life babies, unless said babies were 1) related to them, 2) professionally entrusted to their care, or 3) keeping the entire friggin' block awake with their colicky bleating. 

Even if the subject matter were guaranteed box-office insurance (and I don't think it is -- prior documentaries about babies and parenting failed to escape the art-house ghetto), Balmes' primitivist film storytelling would likely neutralize it.

There's little music in "Babies," no narration and few title cards. Most of its running time consists of long, uncut, static wide shots of babies being babies: playing, gurgling, babbling. By all rights, such a no-frills approach should grind down even the most sentimental viewer's patience like a teething biscuit. (Village Voice contributor Dan Kois' abstract, Gertrude Stein-ish review is as rude as it is accurate.) Yet the pin-drop silence continues throughout the movie's running time, punctuated only by expected, appropriate reactions: laughter, awwwws, and sotto-voiced conversations between parents and formula-fed tots about what, exactly, that infant is doing with mommy's booby.

I don't think the movie's communion with audiences can be explained by its subject matter, its nurturing by deep-pocketed distributor Focus Features, or even its appealing trailer, which doubled as a viral video. (Though promoters of all kinds should note how that trailer spread. As experts told an audience at a South by Southwest panel on how to make a successful viral video, "Most videos that go viral spread happiness.") Yes, marketing and promotion drive people to the box office. But once viewers take their seats, they either like the movie or they don't. Period.

I don't think the movie's power owes to any message, either. Balmes has explained "Babies" as a One World parable whose intent is to transcend cultural and geographical barriers and show that people are people and babies are babies. The film follows four children: Mari, raised amid the vertical ice cube trays of Tokyo; Bayar, a rural Mongolian whose childhood pets include chickens and goats; Ponijao, a Namibian who grows up in a dusty, fly-strewn village; and Hattie, born to New Age yuppies in San Francisco. Their parents are loving but somewhat abstract presences, featured as their offspring might dimly perceive them, as sources of nourishment, shelter and comfort. Balmes achieves his kumbaya-flavored ambition and then some (though it should be said that after proudly proclaiming such an agenda, the director has some nerve chiding Hattie's parents for being crunchy liberals who keep a "No Hitting" book on their daughter's shelf). But even if Balmes' mission were a deep and urgent one, most moviegoers would dismiss it, rightly, as the cinematic version of a plate of boiled spinach.

It's not the message that matters. It's the filmmaking.

From Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock to Alex Gibney and Errol Morris, the predominant nonfiction film aesthetic is some version of go-go-go-and-never-let-up. It's montage-driven style that seeks to hold one's attention by any means necessary: a flurry of quick-cut images and busy graphics, title cards and stylish reenactments, narration and music (doom synth, pop tunes, Philip Glass). It's nonfiction filmmaking as Ed Sullivan-style plate spinning: razzle-dazzle.

Sometimes this style is dramatically appropriate -- and emotionally involving, and intellectually stimulating -- and sometimes it isn't. Either way it's a far cry from the lo-fi aesthetic of "Babies."

Balmes and his collaborators have gone against the grain of recent documentary film and reached back in time -- way back -- for inspiration. Like another current, sensationally effective, picture-and-sound-driven documentary by French filmmakers, "Disney's Oceans" -- a movie likewise dismissed as eye candy even by critics who enjoyed it -- Balmes has returned to the early years of motion pictures, a time when people were still thrilled by the very idea of cinema as a window that revealed other places, other lives.

"This is the most real documentary I've ever done, the closest I've ever gotten to pure documentary," Balmes told the New York Times. "Most documentaries are produced like feature films, and that kills [their] specificity. But with this one there was no voice-over, no script. It's just real life."

This kind of filmmaking is easier to describe than it is to do, and "Babies" is a fine example of how to do it. The movie asks the audience to sit in the dark and absorb not just the image of a particular baby but also the ambience of the living room or bedroom, country road or city street that serves as backdrop for moments in the baby's development. It then asks us to ponder the fact that these babies are less than a year old and strongly rooted in the specific daily experience of life in four very different parts of the world, yet we can already see their personalities not so much taking shape as emerging, like intricate sculptures that were buried in the soil a long time ago and are just now being unearthed. 

Lay it all out, brother.

García always has made the kind of ensemble films ("Nine Lives," "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her") that have become nearly as insidious a cinematic cliché as the big-budget action movie. In some ways, "Mother and Child" is no exception. To wit: A snaggle of seemingly disconnected subplots rotate around an overarching theme (in this case, adoption). Coincidences occur that both reveal the great wisdom of the universe and handily move the plot along, and virtual strangers profoundly affect each other by trading clever paragraphs of dialogue in unlikely places (a rooftop).

But sometimes clichés really are clichés for a reason. Though the ensemble film may have toppled such otherwise serviceable directors as John Sayles, when it works, as with Robert Altman's every other project (to quote Pauline Kael), it offers rich insight into the human condition. Certainly in this saga of four generations of mothers and daughters, García has achieved a scale and empathy that far surpasses his previous machinations without sacrificing the nuanced platforms he has granted actors all along.

As Karen, a physical therapist who still lives with her mother, Annette Bening delivers her finest performance in decades. Doggedly unadorned, she sports the depressing little bangs of women everywhere who mourn their lost youth, and mines that always precise enunciation to convey a brittle self-possession that is echoed in her daughter, Elizabeth (Naomi Watts, at her best), a lawyer whom she has never met although they both dwell in Los Angeles. Is it that city's evocative geography or plain laziness that makes L.A. the home of so many ensemble films, from "Crash" to the recent disaster "Valentine's Day"?

A cool number bordering on a cold fish, Elizabeth eschews all permanent human bonds and goes to great lengths to dissolve other people's as well. She beds her widower boss (a remarkably restrained Samuel Jackson) in what she informs him is "a sexual relationship of a temporary nature." She also beds her neighbor (Marc Blucas) when his pregnant wife (Carla Gallo) cheerily interrogates her one too many times, and then makes sure to slip her soiled panties into their apartment when he's not looking. When she gets pregnant, she's not only disturbed because the father's identity is unclear but because she tied her tubes when she was 17.

It's a neat trick that Elizabeth and Karen's damning cadences and quick, tight smiles mirror each other so accurately, and another neat trick that we are left to wonder how much to make of it -- just as we never know what to extrapolate from the spiritual and emotional dilemmas of infertile Lucy (Kerry Washington, charming and formidable) as she struggles to adopt a child from college student Ray (Shareeka Epps). The son of author Gabriel García Márquez, García is no stranger to the myriad burdens and boons of legacies. But although he raises a bevy of worthy questions about whether blood or proximity seals family ties -- or, even more compellingly, whether family ties ever truly exist -- he doesn't purport to answer them. To his credit.

More overt is García's feeling about the dance between men and women. In his cosmos, women are invariably all-powerful beings, driven by their passions and protective instincts, and he seems to respect this power if slightly fetishize it. All sexual encounters are initiated by ladies, uh, manhandling their partners, and all male characters, from Karen's beau Paco (an un-hammy Jimmy Smits, if you can believe them apples) to Lucy's husband Joseph (David Ramsey), cower in the presence of females, whether out of respect or resentment. After a while, this gender imbalance begins to grate. Under all that deference lives a strange passive-aggression, a sense of men as innocent bystanders to the wilderness that is Woman, hear her roar! It's the cinematic equivalent of the guy who wears a ponytail, rides a bicycle to work, takes his wife's last name and then beats her up for using the wrong recycling bin.

But such bizarre kowtowing fails to overshadow "Mother and Child's" overall strengths. Though over two hours, it's that rare film that never lags because it covers so much ground in both time and topic without preaching. Even more rare, the characters' integrity is never sacrificed to the film's exploration of nature versus nurture. Channeling an old-soul compassion, García has not only redeemed himself but also a nearly exhausted genre.

A former labor organizer, Lisa Rosman writes the Indiewire film and television blog New Deal Sally. Her work regularly appears in Time Out New York, usmagazine.com, and IFC.com, and she previously served as the Flavorpill film editor from 2005-2009, the Brooklyn Rail film editor from 2003-2005, and the mistress of the film blog The Broad View from 2005-2008.