Clockwatchers.

• Author: McKissack, Fredrick L., Jr.

In a summer filled with bone-head bonanzas about big rocks colliding with the Earth and a rubbery uber-lizard terrorizing New York, it is refreshing that Clockwatchers has wandered its way into being a minor hit.

Not that this film about four American women working as temps is well known. It's received little in the way of television or print advertising, but it sticks out like a wildflower among the weeds, with $8 per ticket thorns.

Toni Collette (Muriel's Wedding) stars as Iris, a shy and repressed young woman who takes a temporary job at Global Credit. And how horrific is this place? The background music is the sort of mind-numbing crap designed to keep the inhabitants from uprising, the fluorescent lights look as though they kill brain cells, and the minute hand on the clock taunts office workers by briefly moving backwards before going forwards. Fear, loathing, and eventually paranoia add to the general malaise.

There's also the cast of sub-human characters that inhabit most corporations: an officious office manager who has the ability to simultaneously smile and suck the life out of you; a supply person unwilling to part with his inventory (though, when others aren't looking, he plays with it); and bosses that hang on to the hierarchical structure the way a drowning man would cling to a life preserver.

Any sane human being would walk out the first day. But maybe that's the point: Where's Iris going to go? If her life were that easy, she wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.

Iris's descent into hell on earth is guided by Margaret (Parker Posey), the tough ringleader of the temps, who despises the male corporate drones she works for but sucks up to them anyway to get noticed for a full-time gig.

Newsweek recently dubbed Posey "Queen of the Indie" films. But maybe it's her talents as an actress, her energy on screen, and the restraints of corporate cinema that keep her from becoming the next Sandra Bullock. No complaints here.

The other two members of the clique are Paula (Lisa Kudrow), who fantasizes about being an actress, and Jane (Alanna Ubach), who is patiently counting down the days until she gets married to her cheating boyfriend.

The four women become fast friends in the way adolescents do. They smoke, hang in the bathroom, ridicule other office employees, and go out after work--these are all the enjoyments they have in their drab, dreary, less-than-ordinary lives.

Then the friendships start to erode--inevitably, given...