Fresh from his triumph as a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, Heath Ledger re-ups as a hetero playing the world's greatest eighteenth-century lover. His comic flair is a big plus in a film that is fanatically busy and fatally sexless. The whimsical plot, involving Casanova's seduction of a cross-dressing feminist (Sienna Miller rivals the Venice locale for beauty), isn't helped by director Lasse Hallstrom's leaden hand. Oliver Platt is fun as the "lard king" with a yen for Miller, but he's just…

While not quite as irresistibly seductive as its title character, Casanova is the perfect cinematic one-night stand: charming, romantic and awfully easy on the eyes.

Story

With its disguises, plot twists, and mistaken identities--not to mention period costumes and vintage Italian architecture--Casanova feels like an adaptation of a play that Shakespeare never wrote. Structured as a flashback told by the legendary lover/adventurer himself, Casanova is ostensibly the tale of the bed-hopping…