Words & Pictures

Art instructor Juliette Binoche, and English teacher Clive Owen form a rivalry, creating a competition at their prep school in which students decide whether words or pictures are more important. Director Fred Schepisi infuses this script with great playfulness, while Owen and Binoche, playing characters whose abundant personal troubles have not yet crushed their fiery spirits, are as charismatic and complicated as ever. Their war is not so much about individual victory as it is about collective triumph.