Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) is a 32-year-old California fashion photographer whose carnal interest in the teenage girls he shoots evaporates around the time they turn 15. As "Hard Candy" opens, we find him cruising an online chat room in his nightly search for younger stuff. In fact, he's in the process of reeling one in. She's 14 years old — just right — and we see their conversation popping up on his computer screen. "Whatcha doing now?" he asks. Her response couldn't be more perfect: "Besides fantasizing over you?" After a bit more flirting, the girl agrees to meet him at a local diner — her big sister can drop her off.

The girl's name is Hayley (Ellen Page), and at the diner Jeff spots her immediately. She's a pretty, brown-eyed, freckly kid, her dark hair cut tomboy-short. She's sitting at the counter eating a piece of chocolate cake and reading a book about the sad, screwed-up life of the late movie actress Jean Seberg. As an awkward conversational gambit, Hayley tells Jeff that Seberg "slept with all the wrong people. I'm only gonna sleep with the right people." Jeff insinuatingly dabs a smear of chocolate off her lip with his finger, then tells her he has a recent concert by Goldfrapp — a group he just loves — recorded on MP3. It's back at his house. Hayley, apparently a Goldfrapp enthusiast also, agrees to go home with him to hear it.

Jeff's place is sleekly modern. Hayley marvels at the blown-up photos of young women on his walls. Jeff pulls a vodka bottle out of the fridge and makes them each a screwdriver. He shows Hayley his little photo studio. Knocking back her drink, she tells him, "Why don't you get out one of your cameras and see what you can get out of me." Then she goes to the kitchen to pour a pair of refills. Circling around her, sipping his drink, Jeff suddenly feels woozy, then worse; then he collapses to the floor. When he wakes up, he's tightly bound to a chair. Disoriented, he figures this must be some kind of kid joke. He asks Hayley, standing nearby and seeming somehow different now, "Why did I get tied up first, if this is the game we're gonna play?" She's not smiling anymore. "Jeff," she says, "playtime is over. It's time to wake up."

"Hard Candy" has a luscious conceit: In the same way that Jeff is a pedophile who preys on little girls, Hayley is a little girl who preys on pedophiles. She's fixated on the recent disappearance of one little girl in particular, and she seems certain that Jeff knows something about it — maybe all about it. She's already told him that her father is a doctor, and when she pulls out a scalpel and some green surgical scrubs from her bag, we can see that she's serious about extracting the truth from him.

The movie has a peculiar intensity — it's boldly distasteful, even unpleasant, but it's largely fascinating, and it's also funny. Mocking Jeff's faux musical hipness and his cheesy MP3 ploy to get her back to his house, Hayley tells him, "You used the same phrases about Goldfrapp as they do on Amazon.com. Plus," she says, "I f---ing hate Goldfrapp." Jeff and Hayley are both a little out of focus. Jeff may be a predator, but the chummy come-on he uses to seduce his young marks really is seductive. (And Patrick Wilson, who plays him, bears a striking, way-out-of-place resemblance to Kevin Costner.) Hayley, for her part, shows no evidence of being a victim herself, a girl bent on personal revenge. Her cool calculation in stalking and bagging Jeff suggests something more cold-blooded behind her sweet angel face. She's a little frightening herself.

First-time feature director David Slade (best-known for the videos he's made with such bands as System of a Down and Stone Temple Pilots) captures the actors' most subtle nuances in probing close-ups, and he exerts firm control over the film's formal elements, especially its color design. (The chilled-out décor in Jeff's house has sparse dabs of richly saturated color — arterial red and a bright, peachy orange — and as the camera glides around the set, they intermittently loom forth to fill the screen.) Slade also manages the considerable task of generating enough suspense to hold our interest in a movie that consists essentially of two people talking (although often in the midst of the most alarming actions). In this he is valuably assisted by playwright and first-time screenwriter Brian Nelson, whose dialogue has a bright, acrid tang. (Gloating about the ruinous embarrassment that would be attendant upon any public disclosure of Jeff's vile erotic activities, Hayley tells him, "You're a headline waiting to happen.")

The movie's flaws are mainly a matter of plausibility. A long middle sequence in which Hayley threatens and then begins to carry out a terrible punishment is too luridly contrived to be entirely feasible. And even though Hayley has told Jeff that she's had him under surveillance, and knows that his neighbors are all away, it turns out that one of them is very visibly in residence right next door. (She's played by Sandra Oh, of "Sideways," and she comes knocking at a really inconvenient moment to deliver some Girl Scout cookies Jeff has ordered.)

It's a powerful film, though — it wrings you out. And it's a spectacular showcase for the Canadian actress Ellen Page. She was a very young-looking 17 when the movie was shot, but her extraordinary emotional command — morphing in an instant from fresh, coltish charm to icy-eyed menace — is a marvel. We have no idea where Hayley is going at the end of the movie, but we suspect that Page is on her way to some large kind of stardom.

"The Notorious Bettie Page": A Whip And A Smile

Gretchen Moll doesn't look a lot like Bettie Page, the '50s fetish queen whose photos and films are more celebrated (and more widely available) now than they were in her heyday, from 1950 to 1957. Moll is more lithe and less assertively bosomy than Page ever was. But there's one scene in this movie in which the actress completely captures the spirit of her character. Bettie is out in the country with a male friend, an amateur photographer, and after a few poses, he suggests that she remove her clothes. Without giving it much thought, she does. And as Moll stands facing the camera, completely and uncaringly naked, we get a glimpse of the quality that comes through so vividly in Page's photo spreads — a simple delight in displaying her perfect body. It's a small, electric moment.

The director, Mary Harron ("American Psycho"), approaches America in the 1950s as another country, and of course it was. It seems amusing today — if not astounding — that a smalltime model like Page, who never appeared nude or bared so much as a breast in her "notorious" bondage photos and flickery burlesque films, could be cited by a U.S. Senate subcommittee as part of the wave of pornographic perversion that was felt to be polluting the minds of American youth. But as we see at the movie's beginning, she was.

Using vintage film techniques, and weaving grainy archival footage through some sequences, Harron creates a convincingly raw approximation of New York in the 1950s: the black-and-white nighttime streets, the streetlights' glare, the seedy Times Square magazine shop where lone men huddle guiltily around racks filled with skin mags like "Escapade," "Titter" and "Wink."

Bettie Page (it was "Bettie" on her birth certificate, but she was almost always billed as "Betty" in her photo layouts) is a Nashville girl from a religious family who's come to New York by Greyhound bus, fresh from a failed marriage. After knocking around town for a bit, she drifts into the orbit of Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer) and his sister Paula (Lili Taylor), a strangely amiable, middle-aged pair of skin-trade entrepreneurs who run a sort of mom-and-pop mail-order pinup factory. As part of their business, the Klaws cater to a specialty clientele with heavy-breathing interests in such things as shapely feet and women in ropes and shackles. Their models, of whom Bettie soon becomes one, have little interest in these eccentricities — they can't really fathom why anyone else would be interested in them, either. To the girls it's all a game of dress-up, and they spend hours wobbling around on shiny black six-inch high heels and pretending to spank one another. (In the actual Klaw photos from this period, you can see Bettie all but giggling as she flicks a whip and tries to strike a malevolent pose.)

Harron's recreation of this long-gone demimonde is certainly evocative, and it gets an extra jolt of authenticity when Jared Harris appears, playing the famous fetish photographer and cartoonist John Willie. Harris, the son of the late Richard Harris (of the Harry Potter movies), exudes an air of seamy, down-at-heel dissolution that's emblematic of the old, pre-Disney Times Square.

Gretchen Moll seems to hit all the right notes as Bettie, too. She's funny discussing Jesus with Willie while he has her all tied up during one of his "private sessions" at the Klaws' studio. And at the end, when she points out that Adam and Eve never got in trouble until they put their clothes on, she makes Page seem pretty smart in her way, too.

But the movie is low on energy, and it droops into its own lassitude. The script (which Harron co-wrote with Guinevere Turner) sets Bettie and the Klaws up for a fall against the obscenity-busting Congressional subcommittee run by Senator Estes Kefauver (David Strathairn). But despite some pious moralizing from various testifying "experts," neither Page nor her employers were found guilty of anything, so this clash, such as it is, has no resonance; it doesn't project the cultural shakeout that would follow in the '60s. We can savor the exotic otherness of the 1950s from our vantage of more than half-a-century later, but there are no prefiguring intimations as to how, as a culture, we got to here from there. Despite all the admirable effort that Harrod has put into period verisimilitude, and the solid acting, the movie is a little disappointing. In her prime, Bettie Page always delivered.

—Kurt Loder

Check out everything we've got on "Hard Candy" and "The Notorious Bettie Page."

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