At his best Mike Nichols makes you never want to fall in love. His finest work - The Graduate (definitely on my personal favourite list of movies) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - always suggests that love implies the possibility of betrayal.

And so it goes: Nichols' Closer, while not his best, is an examination of the 'ever after' in 'happily ever after', looking what happens after the flush of a relationship dies in two (distractingly photogenic) couples - Alice (Natalie Portman) and Dan (Jude Law), as well as Larry (Clive Owens) and Anna (Julia Roberts). Indeed, just as much as romantic comedies often strip relationships down to the joy of boy meets girl, Closer strips relationships down to the aftermath, jump-cutting to the moments of pain, and showing that love comes with the power to hurt. Right from the outset, the film intertwines violence and love: Dan, an obituary writer, meets Alice on a London street, and she gets hit by a car, and the couple fall in love by flirting at the hospital. The film looks at the fallout of impulses, specifically Dan and Anna's affair, which leads to raw, sometimes inescapably childish, reactions.

One of the oldest bases for tragedy is the need to know everything: that need sets off an irreversible chain in Oedipus Rex, and here in Closer the need to know the facts about the affair first sends into a spiral Larry and Anna's relationship, and then breaks Alice and Dan's one. Yet there are no easy moral lessons to be drawn from the bitter words. Should there be bounds in a relationship, or scrupulous limitless honesty? And why should being honest obviate our moral responsibilities? Do we not have to be good, not just truthful? Will the truth really set anyone free? Or is truth just another option?

Closer was adapted by Patrick Marber from his own play, and it's easy to visualise all four characters stalking each other around the stage hurling their blistering verbal assaults, as they take very deliberate footsteps and stake their own territory: you can almost sense the stage blocking as each actor claims his or her physical space. Each member of the quartet also fiercely guards his or her verbal space, placing limits on what the other can and cannot say: one of Owens' best scenes comes as he spits out "don't say I'm too good for you".