The title refers to an advice-to-the-lovelorn column written by the hero (Steve Carell), a widower with three daughters who takes them to a family reunion in Rhode Island, but it isn’t too bad as a description of the movie’s plot. On an idle visit to a bookstore in a local coastal village, he meets and falls for a woman (Juliette Binoche) who later turns out to be the girlfriend of his brother (Dane Cook), also along for the reunion, which leads to many romantic agonies. The setup of this comedy by director-cowriter Peter Hedges (Pieces of April) and some subsequent twists may be contrived, and the laughs aren’t very plentiful, but much of the behavior seems real, and the able cast makes the most of it. With Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney. PG-13, 95 min. (JR) Read more
Reduced by roughly a quarter of its original running time by the writer-director, Charles Burnett’s long-unavailable second feature (1983) still carries a charge with its pointed theme, flavorsome neighborhood vignettes, and mainly nonprofessional cast. (Though there’s slippage at times between some of these people and the parts they’re playing, their indelible reality and warmth as presences recall Cassavetes’s Shadows.) The hero (Everett Silas), who works at his parents’ dry-cleaners in Watts, is torn by his divided loyalties between his family’s middle-class aspirations (epitomized by his brother’s upcoming marriage to an upscale lawyer) and his disreputable best friend, who’s just out of prison. Burnett invests this conflict with primal meanings that grow in resonance, but his narrative method, which sprawled a bit in the original, now seems telescoped and overly schematic. 87 min. (JR) Read more
