Egoyan in Toronto

Roger Ebert likes Atom Egoyan's Chloe, which stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried and will (if it's as good as Ebert says and with some luck) restore Egoyan to A-list art house status.

Atom Egoyan's "Chloe," one of his best and certainly most commercial films, begins as a hypnotic story of suspicion and jealousy, and continues through passion and eroticism to an unexpected but logical conclusion. It becomes a battle of wills between the middle-aged wife (Julianne Moore) of a famous professor, and a 20-year-old prostitute (Amanda Seyfried). The professor (Liam Neeson) has a habit of flirting with women that his wife finds troubling, and when he says he missed a flight home on his birthday she doesn't believe him.

She has reason to know that a young blonde women (Seyfried) is a prostitute, and knows how to locate her. She thinks she's her husband's type. She pays her to "meet" her husband and report on how he behaves toward her. I've seen a similar device in other movies, but Egoyan treats it in an entirely different way. The two women find themselves drawn into a web of secrets and confidences, and Egoyan, as so frequently, is a master of sexual obsession and the ways of seduction.