Here's a new movie rule: If you're going to sit through a Sundance "crowd-pleaser," complete with cardboard situations and cheeseball snark and life lessons, it's always better if that movie stars Shirley MacLaine. In "The Last Word," she plays - what else? - a cutely difficult pie-eyed pixie-curmudgeon who is always scolding everyone and telling them how to improve themselves. I can think of many films where she played a similar role that outclass this one - like "Terms of Endearment," "In Her Shoes," "Bernie," or "Postcards from the Edge." Those were real movies. "The Last Word," written by Stuart Ross Fink and directed by Mark Pellington, is an eager assemblage of quasi-fake setups and two-stroke characters. It makes "Little Miss Sunshine" look…organic. (It's also not nearly as well-made.) Yet MacLaine, who isn't above falling into high-concept shtick herself, hasn't lost the gift of spontaneity. At 82, she's spry and fearless. The movie is glorified claptrap, but she hitches it to her acerbic zest for life and acting and walks away with it.

MacLaine plays Harriet Lauler, an affluent dame who lives by herself in a beautiful Colonial in the town of Bristol, where she once led her own advertising agency. Harriet possessed talent and drive, and still does, but she suffers from what the film calls "obsessive-compulsive personality disorder," which means that she has to control the world around her and do every last thing her way. She has alienated everyone she's ever known; at one point, a man calls her hateful, and the camera inches down to show us that he's wearing a priest's collar. But the way a movie like "The Last Word" works, this is all our cue to see that, deep down, Harriet is nurturing a heart of gold.