Catfight

Get ready to rumble! The latest from prolific indie writer-director Onur Tukel takes a set-up that in most films would lead to a heartwarming story of female friendship — and uses it instead as the springboard for an outrageously madcap black comedy.

One-time college pals Veronica (Sandra Oh) and Ashley (Anne Heche) run into each other at a party. The women, now in their forties and having not seen each other since school, find that their lives have taken radically different paths. Ashley is barely scraping by as a painter of politically charged canvases, while Veronica is married to a wealthy businessman who's about to profit hugely off yet another US-led war in the Middle East.

Within minutes of their reunion, a rivalry is revived, old wounds are torn open, and a Manhattan stairwell becomes home to a woman-on-woman brawl the likes of which are seldom seen outside of martial-arts epics. And now the gloves are off. Over the course of five years and three bloody, bone-crushing rounds, Catfight's formidable adversaries will lose everything they cherish, and rail furiously as their fortunes are subject to wild reversals.

Oh and Heche are comedy gold, and they tackle their roles (and each other) with vicious brio. As he tracks his antagonists' unpredictable fates and ferocious fisticuffs, Tukel also manages to get in several jabs at US foreign policy and conservatism.

Catfight is a knock-down-drag-out great time, and its attitude — toward combat and politics alike — is strictly no-holds-barred.

JANE SCHOETTLE