ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000). Giving perhaps her best performance in a budget-stretching if not range-stretching career, Julia Roberts intimidates as the real-life working-class mama of the title who took on a polluting utility company and won the biggest direct-action lawsuit ever. Roberts's penchant for getting the best lines and putting her hoity-toity nay-sayers in their place does grow tiresome -- there's a limit to how many brassy, crowd-pleasing speeches and smart-ass retorts you can get away with. But just as director Steven Soderbergh invisibly shapes the movie, so do his hapless male characters keep the overbearing spitfire in check, including Albert Finney as the lawyer she works for and Aaron Eckhart as the biker next door who offers to babysit Erin's kids. Tougher to manage is the ending, which focuses on a large figure on a check. Not as large as the one Roberts got for playing the part, but big enough to alienate those who had come to identify with Brockovich as the unspoiled hero of the working class -- this film would be more satisfying if we saw Erin go broke.

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