Featured attraction
This giddy romantic comedy should do for Josh Lucas what last year's Legally Blonde did for his radiant costar Reese Witherspoon—namely raise his stock sky-high in Hollywood. Lucas, a supporting player in A Beautiful Mind, is seriously cute. With his blond hair, mischievous blue eyes and lazy grin, he has the devastating looks and magnetic sexiness of a young Paul Newman.
Lucas plays Jake, the good ol' boy husband whom Melanie (Witherspoon), now a rising fashion designer in Manhattan, abandoned seven years earlier back in rural Alabama after a quickie teen marriage. Upon becoming engaged to the dashing and attentive Andrew (Dempsey, no slouch himself in the handsome department), whose snobby mother (Bergen) is the Big Apple's mayor, Melanie hightails it home to legally shed Jake. Though she calls him a "dumb, stubborn redneck hick" and he replies in kind, it's clear there's still potent chemistry between the two.
As romantic comedies go, Home is enjoyable fluff. There's sizzle aplenty betwixt Lucas and Witherspoon, who comfortably carries the picture on her slender shoulders, while Dempsey's charm means there's actually a teaspoon of suspense about the story's outcome. But in striving to build up the characters as more than stereotypes, director Andrew Tennant (Anna and the King) allows the carpentry to show: Subplots are clumsily wedged in, or hinted at and then dropped. And a quality supporting cast (Mary Kay Place and Fred Ward as Melanie's trailer-dwelling folks, Jean Smart as Jake's mom and Ethan Embry as a school pal) is largely wasted. (PG)
Bottom Line: Plenty of Southern charm
Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon
After his fiancée is murdered just weeks before their wedding, Joe (Gyllenhaal) continues to live with the dead woman's parents (Hoffman and Sarandon) in a small New England town. The three are united and yet divided by grief until Joe, to his surprise, finds himself falling for a local postal worker (Ellen Pompeo) who turns out to have some unresolved sorrows of her own.
Moonlight Mile is nowhere near as lugubrious as the above description makes it sound. It's sentimental, and the story doesn't always track as clearly as it might, but writer-director Brad Silberling (City of Angels) finds plenty of comedy amidst the tears, and he elicits strong performances from his leads. Sarandon particularly is amusing as a woman who doesn't suffer fools—especially those who come bearing tea and sympathy—gladly. Mile was inspired by Silberling's own romance with Rebecca Schaeffer, the 21-year-old costar of TV's My Sister Sam who was murdered by a stalker in 1989. Silberling, now wed to actress Amy Brenneman, has made a touching film about getting on with life. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: Commendable, but no miracle Mile
Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Gregg Henry, Talisa Soto
Why bother creating a believable plot or characters when you can substitute gun battles and massive explosions? Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever has none of the former and a surfeit of the latter as Banderas's grizzled ex-FBI agent battles Liu, a trained assassin, and then teams up with her to save a little boy. It's like watching a movie version of Mad magazine's Spy vs. Spy, but minus the humor. (R)
Bottom Line: No winners here
Jackie Chan, Jennifer Love Hewitt
Clothes can make the man but not the movie. In The Tuxedo, an amiable but thoroughly mediocre comedy, Chan plays a taxi driver who, upon donning a technologically souped-up monkey suit, turns into a martial-arts master and soon finds himself mixed up in a sinister espionage plot.
Little of what follows makes sense, but Chan ambles through with his usual good humor and gets to join soul man James Brown at a gig in one of the film's better scenes. Hewitt, playing a government scientist who aids Chan's novice spy, shows herself to be a good sport, though one never believes for an instant that her character ever memorized the periodic table. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: All dressed up, but the movie goes nowhere
Chris Eyre's eyes light up as he recalls bookmobile visits to his hometown of Klamath Falls, Ore., when he was a kid. Which explains, in part, why Eyre, the country's preeminent Native American director, chose a uniquely mobile method to launch Skins, his latest film. After persuading the movie's distributor to spiff up an out-of-commission 100-seat traveling cinema, Eyre, 33, embarked on a cross-country tour and rolled his feature film to 11 destinations this summer, including the Pine Ridge, S.Dak., reservation where he shot his story about a Lakota man's struggle with alcoholism. "As Indians we don't recognize ourselves in the movies from Hollywood," says Eyre. "My purpose is to show things as they really are and open a discussion among Indian people."
Eyre first earned praise with his debut, Smoke Signals, which was a Sundance hit in '98. "He believes that even the most specific stories about race and culture can be enjoyed by people of different backgrounds," says Skins producer Jon Kilik. Adopted by a white couple, Eyre didn't meet his Cheyenne birth mother until he was 26. Now living in L.A. and in the Black Hills of South Dakota with his Lakota companion of six years, Lori Pourier, 39, and their 3-year-old daughter Shahiyela, he is learning the Cheyenne language and finds himself more connected to his heritage than ever. "I have an unlimited canvas," says Eyre, who is currently working on two more Indian-themed projects. "Native Americans are the most complex group of Americans there are."
Margaret Nelson
The Banger Sisters Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon, who were rock groupies in their wild youth, reunite decades later. A Lifetime TV movie blessed with superior casting and a handful of good laughs. (R)
Barbershop Shear fun. Ice Cube stars in a big-hearted comedy about a barber, his staff and their customers. (PG-13)
Igby Goes Down Kieran Culkin is superb as a troubled teen on the loose in Manhattan in a smart, cranky coming-of-age tale. (R)
Trapped Just what America doesn't need after this past summer: a thriller about a little girl being kidnapped. Kevin Bacon and Courtney Love play the bad guys, Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend the parents. Competently done, but what's the point? (R)
Spirited Away A magical cartoon fantasy for older kids and grownups. (PG)
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
