The Ice Storm

Ang Lee leapt from the 18th century England of "Sense and Sensibility" to the malaise of suburban 1970s New England for this adaptation of Rick Moody's novel, a portrait of a family drifting apart in the wife-swapping days of Nixon's America. Lee's chilly recreation of a stormy Thanksgiving weekend captures a culture in snapshot, but the story lies in the bottled up and insular frustrated adults (Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Allen and Henry Czerny), and kids (Adam Hann-Byrd, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood) so desperate for emotional contact that they reach out to each other. It's no surprise that the only character to have any grasp of the world outside of their suburban home is Ricci's Watergate-obsessed teenager. The two-disc set from Criterion features commentary by director Lee and producer-screenwriter James Schamus, a retrospective documentary with new interviews with Allen, Kline, Weaver, Maguire, Ricci and Wood, a new video interview with novelist Moody, deleted scenes, and other supplements, along with a booklet featuring an essay by film critic Bill Krohn.