The Business of Strangers (2001)

Image credit: The Business of Strangers: JoJo Whilden

'STRANGERS' INTERLUDE Channing’s businesswoman plays dirty

Any similarities between the testosteronic smackdowns of ''In the Company of Men'' and the estrogenic mind games played out in an airport lounge between a Ms. magazine-era, middle-aged executive (Stockard Channing) and her Jane magazine-era young assistant (Julia Stiles) in The Business of Strangers are fully intended. Taken together, the two could form the core curriculum of a crash course in bad behavior in the age of corporate sterility.

But the life's-unfair fact is that ''Men'' got there first and shocked better with its guerrilla anti-PC pugnacity. ''Strangers,'' a feature debut by writer-director Patrick Stettner, is more diagrammatic and less organic in its show-offy dismantling of the first-generation-feminist notion that Sisterhood Is Powerful; sisterhood, it turns out, is skin-deep, with the smooth retaining an edge over the wrinkled. None of this detracts, however, from the terrific piss-and-merlot performances of Channing and Stiles, or from the committed participation of Frederick Weller as a Neil LaBute-era businessman caught in the lounge between two she-devils disguised as businesswomen.