By Frau Bluecher

Lindsay Lohan (left) and Nicole Kidman tackle the all-American trait of hypocrisy in new films. Lohan battles cruel teens in Mean Girls. Kidman finds heartache in Dogville.

Hypocrisy is the all-American trait that drives the teenage cruelty at the heart of director Mark Waters' sharp and sassy coming-of-age comedy Mean Girls, a movie too good to be ghettoized as teen entertainment.

Hypocrisy is also the key force behind Danish director Lars von Trier's experimental drama Dogville, shot exclusively on a soundstage with chalk marks defining the Depression-era Colorado mining town where the story takes place.

Few environments represent Americana as much as a suburban high school, the dramatic ground zero in Mean Girls, except for the Our Town-inspired stage design of a fictitious Dogville. In both films, a young, female outsider makes the mistake of believing the friendly words of her new acquaintances. Once the backstabbing begins in earnest, Mean Girls and Dogville become vengeance dramas, although Mean Girls stays true to a slightly cuddly form of revenge, one focused on boyfriends, clothes and the big school dance.

Mean Girls begins with the first day of school for 15-year-old Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who lived all her life in Africa with her zoologist parents before moving to Evanston, Ill. Cady has never attended a public school before, and she's in for a rude awakening at North Shore High.

Friends are few and far between despite the variety of cliques that make up the school: band geeks, cool Asians, the sexually active, girls who eat their feelings and the varsity jocks. Everything revolves around the school's most popular clique, a trio of pretty girls known as the Plastics, and their leader, Regina George (Rachel McAdams).

The Plastics embrace Cady as their new best friend until she becomes interested in Regina's ex-boyfriend, Aaron (Jonathan Bennett). Then, it's an all-out girl war as Regina and Cady plot to secretly embarrass each other.

Mean Girls is produced by Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, and plenty of Saturday Night Live comics appear here. Tim Meadows flashes a smug smile as the school principal. Amy Poehler is at her clownish best as Regina's mother, a middle-aged woman trying to stay young by living her daughter's teen life. Ana Gasteyer is suitably subdued as Cady's unfashionable counter-culture mother.

Tina Fey, head writer at Saturday Night Live and co-host of the show's "Weekend Update" segment, is the dry, cynical anchor to Mean Girls. She's the film's screenwriter, adapting Rosalind Wiseman's book Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence, and plays Cady's calculus teacher, Ms. Norbury.

It's a credit to Fey's dramatic adaptation of Wiseman's nonfiction book that the smattering of high school hallway conversations sound authentic.

"It only counts if you saw nipple," one boy tells another on the way to class.

"Is your muffin buttered?" a boy slyly asks Cady on her first day.

Waters directs with an apparent ease and fondness for the young characters and petty teen dramas. Mean Girls is every bit as smart and lively as his recent remake of the 1976 comedy Freaky Friday or his debut film, The House of Yes.

Situated between an ultra dark high school comedy like Heathers and the more bubbly John Hughes teen movie Sixteen Candles, Mean Girls balances adult satire and pubescent sweetness equally. Unwilling or unable to duplicate the black satire in Alexander Payne's landmark teen comedy Election, Waters keeps the mean-spirited behavior in Mean Girls kid-friendly. What he loses in comic bite he compensates with energy.

As Gretchen Weiner, loyal sidekick to Regina, Lacey Chabert makes the most of her key gag, a desperate attempt to create a new slang, "fetch." Amanda Seyfried shows a knack for physical comedy as Karen, Plastic girl No. 3. Every faraway stare and blank look is perfectly timed and dead-on funny.

McAdams maintains a believable, bitchy veneer as Regina, the school's Queen Bee. Her perfectly rouged lips break into a wicked smile when she calls a girl's parents and pretends to be a counselor from Planned Parenthood. You're convinced that Regina enjoys making her school peers miserable, which goes back to McAdams' icy performance.

At the heart of the film's constant gags and clumsy visual jokes is freckly girl/woman Lohan. Playing school outcast and in-girl as easily as she shifts from plaid shirts and brown corduroys to the body-hugging clothes favored by her Plastic friends, Lohan improves on the comic dexterity she showed in The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday remakes and makes up for her recent stumble in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, a similar high school outsider comedy with half the zest of Mean Girls.

It's anyone's guess what will happen to Lohan once her girlish freckles are completely erased by adult looks and adult sensibilities. For now, she's the boldest bright spot in a genre littered with forgettable movies.

Stories about house parties that spin out of control, girls who pretend to be bad at math in order to get close to the cute boy in class and all the other teenage dramas need an ambassador to make things right and good. For the time being, Lohan is there.

Dogville is the first part in von Trier's planned "American Trilogy" -- the second film, Manderlay, set in the Deep South, has begun production. He's a master of European experimentalism, and his edgy spirit transforms Dogville, which basically is a filmed stage play, into something cinematic, daring and new.

Nicole Kidman stars as Grace, a fugitive who seeks shelter in the isolated town of Dogville and makes a devastating impact on its inhabitants. White chalk lines stand in for town's buildings and the main drag, Elm Street. The actors -- including Stellan Skarsgard, Lauren Bacall, Paul Bettany, Patricia Clarkson, Chloé Sevigny and Kidman -- mime the opening and closing of doors.

There are no exteriors or elaborate special effects, but Dogville isn't a Dogme 95 film, a genre co-created by von Trier that adheres to strict rules of low-budget filmmaking. The camerawork moves swiftly, often shot from a vantage point over the makeshift town.

Kidman brings star pizzazz to the film, and von Trier makes perfect use of it. The film set might be bare, but she looks stunning in her fur-collared jacket and period haircut.

Dogville suits Kidman. She's luminous, even more so than her showgirl performance in Moulin Rouge!

If Dogville has a scathing segment, something worthy of causing a fuss, it's its closing credit sequences, a series of photographs of America's poor, discarded and victimized people set to David Bowie's bouncy "Young Americans." Von Trier has never been to the U.S., but he appears to draw inspiration from Danish photojournalist Jacob Riis, who worked as a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune and whose 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, focused on the gap between America's wealthy and impoverished.

Dogville's story unfolds through a prologue and nine chapters, and John Hurt supplies folksy narration. Bettany is sufficiently awkward as Tom, a young man who sees himself as the town intellectual and is Grace's initial supporter. James Caan makes the most of his small role as a man from Grace's past who brings danger to Dogville.

Kidman is more than famous, meaning she comes to roles dragging the weight of her celebrity behind her. Yet she's every bit as nuanced, heartfelt and emotional as the victimized Grace.

Kidman is a force on the Dogville stage and is equal to von Trier's pretentiousness, arrogance and boldness. They match up well, enough to consider her decision not to continue in his next two films a letdown.

Kidman was believable as a flustered mother in the gothic ghost story The Others. And her role as iconic novelist Virgina Woolf in The Hours continues to be her best-received performance.

But Kidman's best recent screen work is in Dogville. As a victim turned victimizer with a Bible-thumping ferocity in sync with the small town's supposed mores, she's rich and complex and mysterious and beautiful. And unlike The Hours, she doesn't need a putty nose or stringy hair to bring the character alive.

Dogville grade: A

Mean Girls grade: B