"I'm all alone -- won't you give all your sympathy to mine?"

"Tell me a story
about how
you adore me."

I've just returned from watching Notes on a Scandal, and in my head, the Oscar race for Best Actress has grown much tighter. Judi Dench is so good in this film, it's frightening.

I mean, I never forgot that the woman on screen was Judi Dench, but I began to wonder if I'd ever seen her in another movie. She transformed herself brilliantly; the personality of Barbara Covett seemed so natural to her that it obliterated every other memory I had of her work. (I would have these flashes of Dench's image as M in the James Bond film series, but they simply wouldn't reconcile with the severely pinched, achingly lonely spinster of Scandal.)

In fact, Dench was such a shapeshifter in Scandal that I saw many other people in her performance as well. This distressed me quite a bit, and actually, I found the entire film uncomfortably intense at times. It was an experience that often forced me to crouch down in my seat, and even shield my eyes, as if I were watching a horror movie. Scary-good, indeed! Notes on a Scandal made me want to run home and hug my husband in relief.

TRACK LISTING: The Rolling Stones, "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?"