There might be a Stepford near you - the sort of place where Laura Ashley-clad wifeys head to the supermarket in their SUVs while hubbie takes in a couple of rounds at the local golf course.

It's an American Wadebridge, a leafy gated community where the women are as efficient as the latest Dyson and the men look on approvingly from behind their Scotch and cigars.

Into this suburban paradise drops Joanna Eberhart, the once great, now fallen president of an Endemol-style TV network specialising in on-the-edge reality shows.

She's upped sticks from New York with her under-achieving husband Walter (Broderick) to start a new life in a paradise where the priorities are baking cakes and keeping house.

Life is run along strictly male and female lines and enforced by Stepford matriarch Claire Wellington (Close), who presides over bizarre aerobics classes where the exercise routine mimics the spin cycle of your washing machine.

A disturbed Joanne is joined by slovenly Bobbie (Midler) and sceptically camp Roger (Bart) in their suspicion that something isn't quite right in this paradise of McMansions and manicured lawns.

Director Frank Oz has taken the coldly disturbing story of a idyll serviced by domestic and sexual robots and transformed it - with a fair degree of success - into a broad swipe at America's drive for perfection and rampant consumerism.

It's not subtle but there is real enjoyment to be had as Kidman, Bart and Midler (all excellent) probe behind the clapboard facade of a world where there is "no crime, no poverty and no pushing".

No modern Hollywood movie with a nod towards the weird would be complete without Christopher Walken and. lo, here he is as the sinisterly ubane boss of the Stepford husband's closeted club meetings.

American corporate giants such as Apple, Microsoft and Mattel get a gentle kicking and screenwriter Paul Rudnick has fashioned a neat script lampooning politics and pop culture.

"All the women," hisses Bobbie, "are robotic bimbos. All the men are drooling nerds. Doesn't that seem strange? ' 'Not to me,' replies Kidman. 'I worked in television'."

Tim Evans