Boogie Nights.

The best thing about Boogie Nights, a lengthy and panoramic view of the porn film industry in the late 1970s and early '80s, is that it is not nonjudgmental, not laid back, not bemused by its subject matter. Though you can feel Paul Thomas Anderson's affection and pity for his characters (a 155-minute film entirely populated by the rebarbative would put viewers to flight before it was half over), it's clear that he regards them as engaged in a loathsome enterprise, pernicious to themselves and destructive of society at large. This is, in fact, such a moral film that it sometimes threatens to become moralistic. But Anderson's talent keeps his movie fierce, incisive, and purposeful.

Self-deception (and its consequences) is the theme and is perpetrated by nearly every one of the dramatis personae. The ace porn director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds superbly deploying both his charming flippancy and the self-contempt that I suspect has always lurked within that flippancy) considers himself a true star maker when he takes a pathetic high school drop-out named Eddie Adams and makes him the lead stud of his latest opus. Rechristened Dirk Diggler, the boy thinks himself a real actor, a Napoleonic talent on the march. But what kind of stardom is it that depends upon penis length and the ability to ejaculate on cue? Let "Dirk Diggler" get just a bit older and less athletically sexual and his director will start looking around for younger studs, reducing "Dirk" to poor little Eddie Adams again, only now, alas, with a cocaine habit he can ill afford.

And where did that drug habit come from? Surprisingly and pathetically, from Amber Wave, the sex goddess of Jack Horner's films and the director's off-screen lover. Bereft of her children when her ex-husband cites her career during custody hearings as proof of her unfitness as a mother, Amber fastens on Eddie as a surrogate son. But how to demonstrate her affection? Well, cocaine makes her feel good (harrowingly, the actress Julienne Moore shows the light of intelligence dimming in Amber's eyes as she gets deeper into her habit), so why not share it with her beloved little boy? This instance of self-deception isn't treated satirically by Paul Thomas Anderson but with poignancy. Yet the poignancy never conceals the horrific consequences of such motherly care.

I don't have space enough to list the multiple acts of self-deceit that make up the substance of Boogie Nights but suffice it to say that some are sad, most are hilarious, a few lead to monstrous violence, and all are subsumed by the biggest self-deception of all: Jack Horner's illusion that he is an Artist who makes Beauty by pointing his camera at copulating couples. The cold water of reality is poured down on Horner's head by society itself. Sure, his pornography has found its paying public. It's the late seventies and the Playboy Philosophy has prevailed with a significant number of Americans: if it feels good, it is good. But what Horner can't guess is that his audience is much more clear-eyed in its satyriasis than he was in catering to it. Yes, it wants hardcore, but it wants it fast and cheap, and in the privacy of the home. And indeed, by the mid-eighties videos are in and big-screen pornography is in retreat. For quickie porn videos, pretty photography is de trop, coherent storytelling can be dispensed with, dialogue is beside the point, and so is any pretense of acting. Only one thing matters: meat on parade. By the time Jack Horner is riding around in a limousine, trying to pick up young men to do the starlet in the back seat, with everything to be captured on videotape, the director knows very well what he has become: a pimp with a camera. He and most of his colleagues don't end up utterly destroyed (Boogie's epilogue implies that porn is forever), but their dreams of artistry are gone. This movie might have borne the title that Balzac attached to one of his novels: Lost Illusions.

Boogie Nights is never boring, yet, in one sense, its length is a drawback. Since we always know more about the characters then they know of themselves, we are always looking down on them. In pity, in amusement, or in contempt, but always down. Despite excellent acting by the entire cast, not one of the characters becomes an outsized Rabelaisian monster; they all remain pathetically deluded. By the time the film moved into its third hour, my feelings of superiority to the people on screen were backing up on me and turning into smugness. And believe it or not, even a critic doesn't really enjoy feeling smug.

In a sense, our real companion during our tour through Boogie Nights isn't one of its characters, but their creator. We feel this writer-director's presence the way we feel the presence of a novel's author in the shape and flow of sentences and paragraphs. Anderson understands what Martin Scorsese and Orson Wells have demonstrated in their best works: For the meaningful compression and expansion, watch the scene in which Eddie and two other guys wait in a room with a rich gangster while the hoodlum's huge bodyguard, off-camera, tests the purity of the cocaine the youths have brought to sell. Nothing much happens for a while. The boys merely sit on a couch while the homosexual gangster grooves to loud rock music and his boy-toy sets off firecrackers. Yet the explosions and the music and the nervous reactions of the boys fill this one static shot so full of tension that we long for something, anything, to happen. The screen time of this shot is perhaps one minute. But it seems like an hour of exquisite, savory torture.

For meaningful compression there is another scene involving drugs. The still unaddicted Eddie and his sidekick Reed are waiting for a dealer to show up with some cocaine. He arrives. The boys beam: "Perfect timing!" Cut to the very next shot, but now a few weeks or months have gone by. The same dealer arrives with more dope. The now hooked youths look at him and snarl, "What took you so long?" Between these two shots, enslavement has happened.

By the time you read this, Anderson will probably have been signed to a new project, for Boogie Nights has made him a contender. Let's hope that while he was sitting around swimming pools in Beverly Hills negotiating with writers, agents, and executives, he kept a clear head. Hollywood could stand having one cold-eyed moralist on the scene.

The Taiwanese director Ang Lee has obviously done a lot of research in order to depict the Connecticut suburbia of 1973 for his film, The Ice Storm, a portrait of the sexually restless middle class during a Thanksgiving weekend. And, yes, the research is all up there on the screen: the army of commuters packing a train station, the faces of Nixon and all those inquiring senators on TV during the Watergate hearings, the bongs for marijuana, the water bed, the shoulder-length hair on a clergyman trying to be groovy. However, though Lee has captured the period, the period has captured him. This movie functions better as a museum exhibit of the '70s than as a drama. In Boogie Nights, the characters are certainly illustrative of their period and milieu but are also idiosyncratic individuals. The adult characters of The Ice Storm are mostly just emblems of their era who might as well be holding placards against their chests reading: Beautiful but Frigid Housewife; Organization Man Chafing at the Marital Bit; Suburban Vamp Trying to Turn New Canaan into Greenwich Village.

However, the adolescent characters are allowed to show some individuality and the youthful actors all come through with performances that are both finely shaded and spontaneous. The concluding tragic scenes featuring that eponymous freeze are eerily staged, with Jamey Sheridan powerfully projecting a bereaved father's grief. Ang Lee is a director of Mozartian wit and buoyancy and he keeps this shallow movie, at the very least, briskly watchable. But my eyes kept wandering away from the faces of Kevin Kline and Joan Allen and over to some TV set in the background to watch the Watergate hearings. Extraordinary fact easily upstages banal fiction.

Having just seen Boogie Nights, I found one scene of The Ice Storm sociologically acute. When members of a dinner party discuss Deep Throat (the movie, not the informer) as if it were an interesting art film rather than a piece of filth, we may realize why pornographers like Jack Horner suddenly began to think of themselves as artists.