The truth hurts. The truth never hurt anyone. If you want to know what's ticking in Closer -- besides sex as a weapon of mass destruction -- it's the tension between those two contradictory principles. Mike Nichols, the director of 1967's The Graduate enjoying a new creative peak with HBO's Angels in America and Wit, orchestrates that tension into a master class on the art of directing. His haunting, hypnotic Closer vibrates with eroticism, bruising laughs and dynamite performances from four…

Marber, who also wrote the screenplay, describes Closer as ''a love story. It's about other things, [too]--sexual jealousy, the male gaze, the lies we tell ourselves and those we are most intimate with, the ways in which people find themselves through using others. But in the end, it's a nice simple love story. And as with most love stories, things go wrong…'' Boy, do they ever. In this case, the ''love stories'' revolve around two couples: Dan (Jude Law), a frustrated novelist who falls for…