The Human Stain has those qualities we often want but rarely see in our films: intelligence and ambition, decency and humanity, poetry and pity, fire and ice. Watch it and weep.

Most movie characters are like Greek gods and comic book heroes: We learn their roles and powers at the beginning of the story, and they never change. Here are complex, troubled, flawed people, brave enough to breathe deeply and take one more risk with their lives.

Each scene is enticing, draws you in, and tackles the verbal foreplay from the book nicely.

Hopkins' beautifully detailed, deeply felt acting remains a joy to watch...But an even greater pleasure, at least for my money, is Kidman's dark turn as Faunia Farley.

Elegant, thoughtful film.

Powered by two eye-catching performances.

The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking.

The sequences with the melancholy Faunia are monochromatic and those with Lester perfunctory. Benton too neatly -- and too hastily -- wraps up a story that would surely exert more power if it were messy and unrushed.

Benton's version of The Human Stain feels under-energized and modest to a fault. Yet it still delivers a genuine sad sting.

The best thing the movie has going for it is Kidman's performance.

Though Human Stain is sometimes too chaotic and sometimes too neat, it boasts some of the best acting of the year.

Director Robert Benton allows the cast... to shine, but I was left wondering why such a very literary construction as this needed to be made into a movie.

You feel as though you're watching a filmed play rather than a movie. Nothing wrong with that. But The Human Stain, directed more than well enough by Robert Benton, doesn't reach the emotional pitch it's shooting for.

The film's powerful individual scenes seem like excerpts from a missing whole, well-appointed rooms in a house whose beams and girders have been cut away.