The movement to Oscarize Julianne Moore is a noble one, as her work in Boogie Nights, Vanya on 42nd Street, Safe, and Magnolia all arguably deserved such notice; and she's fine in full-on Emma Thompson mode in The End of the Affair. But there's no getting around the fact that Moore's 1999 Best Actress nomination and the film's Best Picture nomination were stretches, or simply a gesture of appreciation for her willingness to combine a solid British accent with gratuitous nudity of the kind most big-name leading ladies now contractually preempt. Neil Jordan's adaptation of the Graham Greene novel looks good and is competently served by Moore and Ralph Fiennes, but the movie's drab circlings about drippy London fail to sustain any sparks. The plot's fulcrum, the circumstances unknown to beau Maurice Bendrix (Fiennes) that motivated the end of his previous affair with Moore's Sarah Miles, ultimately cannot bear the weight of the whole story, which ends up seeming like much ado about not much. Greene's plot idea of having a love triangle (Bendrix, Miles, and her husband--played by Jordan regular Stephen Rea) in which both men employ the services of a private detective to discover whether the woman has yet another paramour is intriguing, and Ian Hart is good as Parkis, the snoop in question. Perhaps the real problem with the movie is that its unraveling of past mysteries takes the place of any interesting present action--the affair has ended, it's still raining, there's nothing left to see here.