on the home front; Sarah Jessica Parker is a haughty interloper in The Family Stone, while Richard Gere plays a single-minded father in Bee Season.(Movie Review)

The enduring irony of TV acting is that the very role that makes you famous can easily become your prison. Nobody knows this better than Sarah Jessica Parker, who has already pulled off one Cinderella transformation, turning herself from a nerdy square peg into Carrie Bradshaw, the bubbly embodiment of fashionable Manhattan. Now, proving that there's life after Sex and the City, she's shrewdly begun retooling her image once again-this time in the sweet-and-sour Christmas tale The Family Stone.

Parker stars as Meredith Morton, a tightly wound businesswoman whose boyfriend, Everett (Dermot Mulroney), takes her home to meet his freewheeling family, headed by Sybil (Diane Keaton) and Kelly Stone (superb Craig T. Nelson). From the moment she walks in the door, Meredith seems like a monster-demanding different sleeping quarters, insulting the Stones' deaf gay son, Thad (Ty Giordano), and his black partner, Patrick (Brian White). Her clumsiness unleashes the smug intolerance lurking in the supposedly friendly Stone family, especially in sister Amy (Rachel McAdams), who proudly sets new standards of rudeness. Although Meredith is treated kindly by bong-happy brother Ben, played by shambly Luke Wilson, she's soon sending for reinforcements in the form of her arty sister Julie (Claire Danes).

The movie was written and directed by Thomas Bezucha, a former fashion executive who obviously aspires to the peerless blend of lyricism and melancholy found in Vincente Minnelli's classic Meet Me in St. Louis-he even sets a wintry montage to Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." But after carefully cooking up an acridly funny fiesta of dysfunction-the Guest from Hell battling an insular Bobo household-Bezucha coats it with a blizzard of sugar. The Family Stone turns into one of those sentimental eighties-style crowd pleasers in which a few rounds of beer will solve all of life's troubles.

Luckily, the actresses are steelier than the movie. Pointedly shedding Carrie's blithe amiability (although not her designer wardrobe), Parker dives headlong into the role of a woman who's brittle as an icicle; indeed, she's so effective at playing unlikable that you start reading that familiar face in a whole new way. This happened a while back with Keaton, who has stripped away her Annie Hall tics to achieve ...