And, like Leaving Las Vegas, The Upside of Anger provides a galvanizing turn for its star--a daring alloy of pungent misery and jaw-dropping antics. Allen became a minor prestige star playing put-upon wives in Nixon, The Ice Storm, and Pleasantville; her characters were presented in terms of pathos, calling on her impressive stage technique within a very limited range. As she sketched them, these woebegone ladies were overdelineated rather than shaded. (She was suppler in her lead role as a principled-but-tough politico in The Contender, but everything was undermined by the shaping of the central issue, her character's sexual history, for maidenly melodrama; click here for my comments.)

In The Upside of Anger, by contrast, Allen's theatrical control helps establish Terry's character and enables the actress to come up with seemingly endless variations on female wrath. Drawing on every technical resource at her command, down to the cords in her long neck, Allen slams through the picture and even its episodicness becomes an asset because you can't guess what madness Terry will succumb to next. There are drawbacks to Allen's craft-consciousness. For instance, after Terry has had a particularly unpleasant exchange with her dancer-daughter, the tight way she re-enters the room and tells the girl to set the table is too pointed in its effect. Allen won't follow wherever Terry's turmoil might take her; as an actress she perhaps has as many control issues as Terry. But in The Upside of Anger the plusses cancel out the minuses in profusion; it's a landmark performance.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.