Against the Ropes is inexcusably lousy but I was interested to see Ryan in a role that could have been a reasonable extension of her star personality. Johnny Depp is so badly miscast in Secret Window you can't imagine what the writer-director David Koepp was thinking of besides cost and availability.

Depp, whose face is as open as a flower but not very expressive, here plays an alcoholic writer who holes up in his lakeside cabin, unable to write, because his wife has taken up with a new man and wants a divorce. John Turturro shows up as a creepy stranger from Mississippi who claims that Depp plagiarized a story of his about a man who murders his wife. The stranger wants proof that the writer published his story before the stranger wrote his, but then the stranger destroys the evidence and generally terrorizes the writer (by killing his dog with a screwdriver, for example).

The "surprise" of the plot is pointless. It doesn't matter whether the stranger is "real" or just a schizzy projection of the writer's, because it comes to the same thing interpretively. It's a battle between the chaotic impulses of the unhappy man who fantasizes murderous stories and the constructive impulses of the writer who contains them in his craft. Even if there are two men, they represent two sides of the writer, and even if there's only one it's an allegorical battle between an evil and a good knight.

What does make a difference, however, is the casting. Turturro is his usual overdeliberate self, every expression superglued to the screen, but he is at least imposing. But whose idea was it to cast Depp as a man so full of sexual anger he kills his own dog (whether actually or symbolically) after his ex-wife speaks of it affectionately? Balled up in a torn bathrobe with messy grown-out dye-job hair, Depp looks like a pouty teenager. The movie actually uses this junior quality for its most memorable moments, when Depp's pain turns into comedy in the scene at the insurance company in which the writer accuses his ex-wife's fiance of "rubbernecking." But a spark-throwing bundle of sexual rage Depp is not, and for the movie to cohere we have to be able to see why it works for this man to have the killer take over the controls from the writer rather than the reverse.

Not that there's any other youngish American actor right now who would be right for the part. (And to be fair to Depp, Humphrey Bogart wasn't better as a wife-killer coming undone in Conflict (1945).) Our actors don't have that kind of masculine sexual aggression anymore, the way Clark Gable and Robert Mitchum once did (when women were less self-conscious about the rough romance of being taken). It is a loss, lopping off one end of the spectrum of our public fantasies. Of course, gay men indulge these fantasies in the rawer forms of porno, and straight women indulge them in soap operas and romance novels, but it's something else to experience them in a less functionally constricted piece of entertainment and incarnated by someone with a more expansive talent.