"Laws of Attraction," a romantic comedy with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore as divorce lawyers on opposite sides of a case, is unromantic and mostly unfunny -- an event of vanishing consequence in its own right. But "Laws" happens to be a rip-off of the classic 1949 romantic comedy "Adam's Rib," in which Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn played married lawyers on opposite sides of a case. As such, it's a key piece of evidence in the case of debased movie culture. This shabby enterprise gets so many things so wrong that it freezes your face into a cringe.

The first offense involves sexual politics. Half a century ago, "Adam's Rib" set up legal and domestic combat between equals. Tracy's character was a literal-minded grump, but relentlessly logical. Hepburn's was mercurial to a fault, but eloquent and passionate. In "Laws Of Attraction," which, not incidentally, was produced by Mr. Brosnan's company, we're back to the days of alluring, self-confident men and screwed-up women who can't resist them. Mr. Brosnan's Daniel Rafferty is Prometheus un-Bonded, a laconic seducer with a quick mind, shriveled ethics that we're meant to see as amusing foibles, and body language that translates freely into "come love me, as I know you will." Ms. Moore's Audrey Woods is, by contrast, a world-class self-doubter with a facade of cool authority that shatters under pressure, in or out of the courtroom. (Her neurotic insecurities, we're told, come from having a beautiful mother, who is caricatured as a lustful swinger by Frances Fisher.)

Audrey has seen so much nastiness in her divorce work that she has stopped believing in marriage, so the TV-thin plot turns on whether Daniel can woo her, win her and keep her. (Ms. Moore has the good grace to look uncomfortable in her foolish role.) I almost stopped believing in movies as the two of them yammered at each other, one-upped each other and jetted back and forth, with or without each other, between New York and Dublin. The fragile logic of the travel interludes, which look like faded outtakes from "Finian's Rainbow," is that the litigants in the divorce case (played with manic energy by Parker Posey and Michael Sheen), own a castle in Ireland that their lawyers must visit for reasons of research. While this is obviously nonsense, it springs from the deeper imperatives of a production based in Ireland, for financial reasons, and of in-flight sequences that amount to commercials for Aer Lingus.

No need to dwell on that, though; plausibility is one of the movie's first casualties, along with style and sophistication. (Peter Howitt's direction is crude enough to make you wonder if he's really the same man who directed the lovely 1998 comedy "Sliding Doors.") The most dispiriting thing about "Laws Of Attraction" is its emptiness. In "Adam's Rib," Tracy and Hepburn were trying a case of attempted murder, one that raised -- in comic terms -- substantial issues about equal rights for women. And they debated those issues with a biting intensity that threatened to tear their marriage apart. In the Brosnan-and-Moore version, the battling lawyers have no grounding in reality -- comic or otherwise -- because there's no substance to what they say or do; they practice divorce law, yes, but mainly they just prattle about sex, money and fancy possessions. Does "Laws Of Attraction" represent an accurate assessment of what today's audiences want, or will settle for? Only time, and the box office, will tell.

'Mean Girls'

Lindsay Lohan is Cady Heron, the cultural equivalent of a girl from Mars, in "Mean Girls," a high school comedy that is sharply observed and often terrifically funny, yet oddly misconceived. The story starts with an inspired device -- a fresh-faced 16-year-old going off, with high hopes and an open heart, to her first day of school. Cady, it seems, has been living with her zoologist parents in the bush in Africa, where she's been home-schooled. Now the family is back in the United States and she is entering 10th grade, without a clue to the laws of the hypersexualized jungle. (Ms. Lohan's performance ranks right up there, and I mean this as a high compliment, with that of Alicia Silverstone in "Clueless.")

"Mean Girls" was directed by Mark Waters from a screenplay by Tina Fey, who has been a reliably bright light on "Saturday Night Live" as the show's head writer and co-host of its "Weekend Update." She also has a role in the movie as Ms. Norbury, a teacher on a mission to decontaminate the poisonous rivalries of teenage girls. (Tim Meadows is charming as the school's melancholy dean.) This is Ms. Fey's first produced feature script, and she's at her best as she discovers high school life through Cady's eyes. It is not a pretty scene, even though it's dominated by a clique of strikingly pretty -- and ruthlessly manipulative -- rich kids called The Plastics, whose queen bee is a blonde predator named Regina George (Rachel McAdams). "Evil," Cady is warned by a wary outsider, "takes a human form in Regina George."

The form that "Mean Girls" takes is serviceable enough -- Cady's journey into the heart of teenage darkness. First she spies on the Plastics by pretending to want to join them, then becomes one of their victims, and then one of them, as mean a girl as any in the school. But form gives way to formlessness as the film becomes a succession of elaborately produced sketches, and Ms. Fey's zestful writing falls victim to Mr. Waters' direction, which is pedestrian at best and sometimes awfully clumsy.

There's another problem. The source material for "Mean Girls" was Rosalind Wiseman's "Queen Bees and Wannabes," a book that was serious about teaching teenage girls how to treat one another with respect. Tina Fey's script deserves credit for taking the book seriously; more than that, her character, Ms. Norbury, runs an earnest though exuberant workshop that teaches just such a lesson, and serves as the movie's climax. The result, though, is acute social commentary diluted by didacticism -- a comedy with, of all things, too much on its mind.

'The Twilight Samurai'

"The Twilight Samurai," a deeply affecting Japanese film by the veteran director Yoji Yamada -- his 77th feature, if you please -- is set in the late 19th century, the twilight of the samurai era. But don't expect to see a Toshiro Mifune surrogate fighting his last spectacular fight. The hero of this tale, Seibei Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada), is a wistful widower -- and low-level samurai -- who struggles with debt, grooms himself indifferently and smells of dried cod. Far from charging into battle with a flashing sword, Seibei can't even drink after hours with his buddies. Early every evening, he must go home to take care of his two young daughters, whom he adores, and his semi-senescent mother. (Thus his nickname of Sir Twilight.)

Such a life would hardly seem to be the stuff of drama. Yet Seibei grows more interesting with every scene. He is amiable but lazy, then surprisingly gallant, then irresolute when true love appears in the person of Tomoe, his childhood sweetheart. Seibei's story is narrated by one of his daughters, whose voice -- that of an old woman -- tells us, well before we know it for a fact, that Seibei and the exquisite Tomoe are long dead. It's a haunting resonance in the story of an ordinary man who finds extraordinary courage late in life.

* * *

DVD TIP: "Adam's Rib," of course. Tracy and Hepburn are the main attractions, to be sure, but not the only ones. David Wayne plays their neighbor, a Broadway composer. Judy Holliday is triumphantly funny as a long-suffering wife who goes after her husband (Tom Ewell) and his mistress (Jean Hagen) with a gun. Holliday was so good, in fact, that her performance won her the role of the not-so-dumb blonde Billie Dawn in "Born Yesterday." George Cukor directed, from a screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com