There's much subtle beauty in the last movie completed by Merchant Ivory Productions before Merchant's untimely death.

Fox uses her earth-tone-clad, Ivy-League-schooled characters the way Jane Austen used hers: taking their privileged, rigid social structures and building a stage to explore deeper human problems.

The acting is uniformly superb.

Heights is stage-bound throughout, and the secrets it would like to keep are very predictable. But its heart is in the right place, and the performances are first-rate.

Heights breathes, is briefly and immediately present, and is over. In this summer of noisy steroid cinema, such small favors are welcome.

The film is one of those interlocking dramas where all of the characters are involved in each other's lives, if only they knew it. We know, and one of our pleasures is waiting for the pennies to drop.

Perversely fascinating.

Beautifully shot on location in New York and consistently well-acted, but it sticks a little too closely to the surface to be very compelling.

Director Chris Terrio confidently delivers a solid first feature, but sometimes doesn't always engage in the characters' inner demons, which could have made an even better film given the cast and material.

These are not people me and you and everyone we know know--these are "short version" people, characters who comfort each other by quoting Shakespeare.

Lacks the energy and vibrancy of the best films to come out of the city in the past few years.

This is brisk and fun to watch, thanks to the actors...But once you catch the main drift of the plot, it becomes awfully ho-hum.

The result is a kind of quirky, high-toned soap opera.

An entertaining ensembler marbled with wit and heartache.