NOTES ON A SCANDAL [R]
Two of England’s best — Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett — flaunt it in Stage Beauty director Richard Eyre’s titillating psychodrama, and it is a pretty dazzling display of skill. Blanchett (Babel) plays a schoolteacher who gets sexually involved with an underage student, and Oscar winner Dench (Pride & Prejudice) is the matronly veteran who finds her out and blackmails her into being friends. While Philip Glass’s score is monotonous and excessive — but when is a Philip Glass score not — the two principals nonetheless play an exquisite cat-and-mouse game that is hard to predict. This Single White Spinster is like To Die For without the body count, and while it may have profited from a little more dark humor and backstory on Dench’s lovable stalker, it is still a joy to watch these two Oscar-nominated actors do their dramatic dance for us. –Robert Newton