Cinema: Taking a Peek at Lolita

Here's how the world has turned: the new movie version of Lolita is at this moment playing without any particular controversy in Moscow, former capital of hopelessly square Soviet socialist morality. After something like a year of relentless salesmanship, producers of Adrian Lyne's near reverent (but by no means inept or exploitative) adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's modernist classic has yet to find a theatrical distributor in the U.S., where, of course, morally ambivalent entanglements between older men and younger women have lately been hot news.

This irony was not lost on the director when he appeared last week at the first...