Bovie Movie

Director Mark Waters follows up high-school comedy Mean Girls with this romantic tale that evokes memories of Ghost and Truly Madly Deeply. Reese Witherspoon stars as Elizabeth, a workaholic emergency doctor who is involved in a serious car crash and wakes up — apparently dead — back in her own home. Not realising her predicament, Elizabeth takes exception to the apartment’s handsome new occupant, David (Mark Ruffalo), a man struggling to get over the loss of his wife. This fresh if somewhat bumpy look at the course of true love benefits from its stunning San Francisco backdrop, while Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite) is perfectly cast as the local bookshop psychic. Although Waters is noted for bringing out the comic in otherwise difficult situations, here he shows his flair for the dramatic, investing the story with a suitably melancholic tone as the disembodied Elizabeth and the emotionally damaged David fall in love. 

This military thriller from director William Friedkin is far-fetched in the extreme, but luckily the action sequences have a terrific, visceral impact — despite there being very little in the way of character development on which to hook them. A traumatised US veteran of the conflict in Kosovo (Benicio Del Toro) is loose in the woods, gruesomely dispatching game-hunters, and the man who taught him how to kill (a typically gruff Tommy Lee Jones) is brought in to track him down. In a case of individuality sacrificed at the altar of efficiency, the two leads have a hard time bringing distinct personalities to their rather clichéd characters (they run, they fight, they run again), though both have enough presence partly to overcome this. Friedkin’s film eventually runs into a blind alley, but until then it’s an enjoyably gritty ride powered by star charisma rather than logic. 

Having previously worked with both actors separately, Shanghai Knights director David Dobkin thought Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn would be a good match, and in some respects he was right. Paired in this lowbrow comedy as lifelong buddies who spend their free time gate-crashing spring weddings to pick up women, they enjoy an easy chemistry that’s difficult to dislike. With Wilson doing his customary laid-back shtick in contrast to Vaughn’s more slapstick turn, they play off each other perfectly. There are a few funny moments as their season-end event culminates in a weekend with the US Treasury Secretary (Christopher Walken) and his dysfunctional family, which comes about when Wilson’s character falls for the engaged middle daughter (Rachel McAdams). However, the leads can’t sustain the humour throughout (particularly when violence rears its ugly head), struggling with an overstretched storyline and material that often feels stale and contrived. 

With this stately adaptation, Kramer vs Kramer director Robert Benton struggles to retain the shocking power of author Philip Roth’s angry meditation on race, class, sex and political correctness. This is mainly because Roth’s blistering denunciation of hypocrisy hinges on a literary trick that doesn’t carry the same visceral punch when adapted to the medium of cinema. Anthony Hopkins plays Coleman Silk, a university professor driven from his job after supposedly making a racial slur. Silk then enlists the help of a local author (Gary Sinise) to tell his story and begins a Viagra-fuelled affair with white trash janitor Faunia Farely (Nicole Kidman). His tragic past is gradually revealed in flashbacks, with Wentworth Miller as the younger Silk desperate to hide the true nature of his lineage. Despite the intriguing material, Benton’s probing of America’s collective consciousness never convinces — Hopkins and Kidman are miscast, Sinise and Ed Harris (as Faunia’s abusive ex-husband) are clichéd and the opening flash-forward dissipates any suspense in the eventual outcome. Worth a look, maybe, but not a close one.