The Business of Strangers, the official selection at the Sundance film festival of 2001, is a well written and mostly well staged drama/character study with a business woman (Stockard Channing) who has just been promoted to CEO of the company which she was just fired from and her creative assistant (Julia Stiles). They are held up at an airport hotel during a storm and confide in each other things here and there, until a corporate head-hunter comes in the scene who raped one of Stiles' college friends. Then the plot unfolds, though rather quickly since it takes place in the span of a night. Nothing great (why it was the official selection at Sundance and at Toronto is beyond me), but still an interesting portrait of women in the business world and how they handle things. The ending is questionable though (is the headhunter lying or is Stiles, you decide). B+
Review of The Business of Strangers
