It’s all a bit Dairy Milk. That was, to wrap it in purple foil, the critical reaction to Les émotifs anonymes when it was released in 2011. Not in the UK, though, where Jean-Pierre Améris’s romantic comedy never made it to cinemas.
A charming assemblage of performers are left pretty much high and dry by Home Again, an LA-based romcom so determinedly glossy that each frame seems more squeaky-clean and unreal than the next. Intended as a star vehicle for Reese Witherspoon, this debut effort from filmmaker Hallie Meyers-Shyer proves only that the apple can fall reasonably far from the tree.
Whereas her (now-divorced) parents, writer-directors Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, at least allowed shards of wit and emotion into such luscious property porn landmarks as It's Complicated and Something's Gotta Give, Home Again seems to have had all actual life leeched out of it. One bar into the Carole King song that gives the film its title, and is saved for the very end, and you experience in an instant the gutsiness and the gusto that have gone missing from the movie itself. 
Witherspoon plays Alice, a putative interior decorator who also happens to be the daughter of an Oscar-winning director who has since died: hey, Freudian or what? On the outs from marriage to music biz mogul Austen (Michael Sheen), Alice has scooped up their two daughters and decamped from New York back to LA, where she readjusts nicely to life in the family manse, which happens to come with the kind of guest house that practically cries out to have three male 20somethings calling it home.
How convenient, then, that these three aspirational Hollywood musketeers (pictured above) strike up an acquaintance one night with a forlorn Alice at a bar and before long are crashing out at hers, which in turn paves the way for the tallest and most vacuous-seeming of the trio, Harry (Pico Alexander), to find his way into Alice's bed. Yes, there's a 13-year age difference between the two lovebirds, which Meyers-Shyer's script treats with the gravity you might afford a missile launch from North Korea. But Alice has a genial, apparently cooler-than-cool mum (Candice Bergen, looking especially airbrushed) who sees to it that the lads are able to call their Spanish-style digs home. All's well that ends well, or so you might think, until such time as Austen heads westward to see if he can put his relationship with Alice to rights. (Sheen and Witherspoon, pictured below)
I'm not sure I know too many women of any age who would so readily allow long-term accommodation gratis to three blokes they met on a boozy night out, but then again, it doesn't hurt that the chaps' collective skills extend beyond the carnal to include the sorts of computer and handyman-related talents on which, I well realise, you really can't put a price. Throughout all this, the two young daughters seem blissfully untraumatised as one after another man hoves into view, Meyers-Shyer stretching to breaking point an ancillary plot point as to whether the sweet-seeming writer George (a genuinely appealing Jon Rudnitsky) will make it to the eldest child's self-penned school play on time. (Between this and Big Little Lies, Witherspoon seems to be drawn of late to celluloid ventures involving theatre: is she hinting at wanting to try some stage work herself?)
One could imagine the same material in more truly complicated, darker hands: I'd love to see what Todd Haynes, say, might have done with the same scenario. As it is, Witherspoon is likeable as ever in the kind of role that once upon a time would have gone the way of Cameron Diaz, and there's a genuinely hilarious Hamilton joke (as in the musical) that doubtless lands better Stateside than here, at least so far. But while everyone acknowledges that it's not really in the remit of such films to peer too long and hard at the world beyond its privileged portals, Home Again is an especially telling study in insularity: a film steeped in the film world but not for an instant engaged with life.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Home Again
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).
AUGUST
The Big Sick is an enchanting film from the Judd Apatow comedy production line. Don’t be put off by the terrible title. There are two forms of sickness on display in the story of Kumail Nanjiani, a Pakistani American who plays himself in his own autobiographical romantic comedy.
Isabelle Huppert isn’t just here for the nasty things in life. Her rape non-victim in Elle was one of the most iconoclastic performances even she’s given, enigmatic yet emotionally rich, rooted and moving. She won’t get nearly as much attention for her role here as Liliane, a singer who came second to Abba at Eurovision, who’s lured out of an anonymous retirement by a besotted, 21-year-old boxer who becomes her lover and manager.
Do the makers of the essentially unnecessary Hampstead have a secret vendetta against north London and its citizenry?
As the only inhabitant of Planet Earth who wasn’t knocked completely senseless by La La Land, it does occur to me that I might not be the most sympathetic reviewer of a rom-com. Still, I’m willing to give it a try. So here goes: written and originally performed by Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna, Dirty Great Love Story is a 95-minute romp that tells a story about how boy-meets-girl, boy-shags-girl, girl-leaves-boy, boy-keeps-bumping-into-girl and – after two years – girl-realises-she-loves-boy.
New Year’s Eve has its rituals and, in the Russian-speaking world, watching the 1976 film The Irony of Fate is core to ringing out the old and ringing in the new. A television staple, it has the seasonal status of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Little Shop on the Corner and White Christmas. First seen in Russian homes as a three-hour, two-part small-screen production on the first day of 1976, it was subsequently edited and shown in cinemas.
If you happened to catch the second part of the Bridget Jones story – Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004, directed by Beeban Kidron) - on terrestrial television recently, or have read the character's creator Helen Fielding's novel Mad About the Boy, you may be confused by the opening sequence of the third instalment in the film franchise, Bridget Jones's Baby. It begins with Bridget, single and childless at 43, sitting alone in her flat on her birthday, with a glass of wine and a cake with a single candle, singing along to “All By Myself”.
Ever since Britain shipped Cary Grant across the Atlantic, the romcom has been a transatlantic English-language staple. This spirited and hilarious – whether intentionally or not – examination of the last 30 years of the genre, dominated as it is by WASPs (yes, white Anglo-Saxon protestants) and the Anglophone world, looked at why we are so fulfilled by these contemporary fairy-tales, and offered some surprising insights.