Consider me stunned…Roger Kumble made an amazing film with Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar being the leads. And somehow his writing and outright stylishness with the story managed to make the fact that Phillippe is not buyable as the sexual god he is seen as in the movie or SMG isn’t great at showing acting ability completely obsolete. Of course, he pried from the right source material, the novel used as the basis for Valmont and Dangerous Liaisons, and managed to make the twists work well. By the final fifteen minutes, you see the brilliance of the film’s payoff. Hell, soundtracking it to “Bittersweet Symphony” alone should get somebody a studio exec’s job and it does a brilliant job of saying all that’s truly left to be said. And amazingly, by the end, they actually got me to cheer for Reese Witherspoon. Bravo.