Lolita

It's all but impossible not to see Adrian Lyne's film of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel through a scrim of fevered controversy. But on its own merits it's really no more shocking than 1992's THE LOVER (based on the autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras), a strikingly similar mix of soft-core imagery and pedigreed philosophy from the boudoir. Initially unhampered by the stringent mores that forced Stanley Kubrick and Nabokov himself -- he scripted the 1962 LOLITA -- to dance around the particulars of European aesthete Humbert Humbert's obsession with gum-snapping American jailbait Dolores "Lolita" Hayes, Lyne and his screenwriter are extremely faithful to...