This new tale from writer-director Rebecca Miller is impeccably acted and manages to be sharp satire, dark comedy and wrenching drama.

Until now, the gifted writer-director Rebecca Miller has always conveyed her spiky intelligence more effectively in print rather than on screen; her films Personal Velocity and The Ballad of Jack and Rose felt sketchy and hesitant.

But her latest effort, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, is of a different order. In the title role, the splendid Robin Wright Penn gets to tackle work worthy of her talents. She plays the fiftyish wife of Herb, a veteran New York publisher (Alan Arkin), who now shares his twilight years in a Connecticut retirement community.

Penn's Pippa is unknowable: beautiful, charming, a perfect hostess, and faintly bland. Yet inside she's unravelling: tired of being an enigma, she wants to break free of her constraints.

The film propels us via flashbacks to her earlier life. As a child she was dominated by her speed-freak, pill-popping mother (Maria Bello, fabulously over the top). As a teenager (the promising Blake Lively) she became involved in explicit photo shoots directed by her gay aunt's partner (Julianne Moore). As a restless, aimless young woman, she met the charismatic Herb.

Pippa's soul-searching reveals her alarming sleep-walking habit and her attraction for danger (in the shape of a neighbour's emotionally damaged son, played by Keanu Reeves.) Clearly she's more complex than the face she presents to the world.

During a recent interview with blockbuster maestro Lorenzo di Bonaventura, IGN fired some questions at him about Constantine 2, sequel to the 2005 comic book adaptation about a cynical detective who deals with the supernatural.


And it seems that the producer is dead keen on the project. "I'd love to do it" he revealed. "We want to do a hard, R-rated version of it. We're going to scale back the size of the movie to try and persuade the studio to go ahead and make a tough version of it."

Di Bonaventura added that he hoped to retain director Francis Lawrence and star Keanu Reeves, and when asked if Constantine would remain a brunette or go blonde - as in the comics - he claimed there was a chance.

You know what? James Bond went blonde, so maybe Constantine. I always find it find that people get that impassionate about a hair colour. We had that experience with The Baroness on G.I. Joe. Sometimes it's part of your character, but it never really strikes me as part of Constantine's character. It's really up to Keanu more than anything. It doesn't seem important to me, but I know it's important to some of the fans."