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"Secretary" beats you black and blue in all the right places, and leaves you grinning from ear to ear with its unexpected fairytale resolution.
In their adaptation of Mary Gaitskill's short story, screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson and director Steven Shainberg wisely scrap the author's lumbering "pity me" posturing in favor of something more lighthearted and colorful -- a giddy bruise, if such a thing is possible. After a stint in the mental hospital, Lee signs up for vocational school, where she discovers a hidden talent as a hunt-and-peck typist. She answers an ad for a secretary, and when this frazzled wreck arrives at the baroque law offices of E. Edward Grey during a raging storm wearing a plastic mackintosh, she's Little Red Riding Hood. Her boss (James Spader), with his menacing whisper and low growl, is the Big Bad Wolf.

