Iron Jawed Angels
The fight for women's voting rights has rarely been given as dramatic a  treatment as inIron Jawed Angels. Hilary Swank (Boys Don't  Cry) and Frances O'Connor (Mansfield Park) star as second-wave  suffragettes Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who led the final fight for the  19th Amendment to the Constitution. Though the movie sometimes tries too  hard to avoid the stigma of a period piece (the soundtrack features  electric guitars, Swank has a steamy moment in a bathtub, and the editing  is jagged and flashy), the mounting energy of the fight--and the  increasingly nasty opposition--gains real momentum when a wartime picket  line leads to Paul, Burns, and their sisters-in-arms being arrested on  trumped-up charges and imprisoned. The actors--including Julia Ormond  (Smilla's Sense of Snow), Angelica Huston (Prizzi's Honor,The Grifters), and Brooke Smith (Vanya on 42nd Street)--give  fervent, determined performances.--Bret Fetzer