As meticulously as his other films recreate Regency England, Civil War–torn Missouri, and China under the Qing Dynasty, The Ice Storm captures in detail and spirit the suffocating malaise of the American suburbs in the early 1970s. Two neighboring families, the Hoods and the Carvers, become psychologically and sexually intertwined as representatives of a cognitively dissonant society in the process of absorbing the cultural revolution of the ‘60s into a conservative retrenchment of bourgeois norms. Free love is bleakly transmuted into furtive extramarital affairs and joyless “key parties” for adults, while their children fumble and fondle one another in desperate pubescent exploration. Adapted from Rick Moody’s novel by Lee’s frequent scriptwriter/producer James Schamus, this is one of the most aesthetically and emotionally successful dramas of the 1990s, the remarkable cast delivering subtle, human performances to match Lee’s masterfully subdued and controlled cinematic tone.