Set against the lavish backdrop of the eighteenth-century French aristocracy in advance of the French Revolution, Stephen Frears’s deliciously cinematic adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s stage play, based on the classic novel by Choderlos de Laclos, revolves around the duplicitous machinations of two former lovers in a match of sex as gamesmanship. Malkovich is brilliant as the roguish Vicomte de Valmont, who is enlisted by the even more devious Marquise de Merteuil (Close) to deflower the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Pfeiffer). Frears’s reliance on close-ups is an effective framing device through which the intensity of the film’s multiple seductions and betrayals emerges.