Someone Like You... Review

Ashley Judd is better than this material by a wide margin, playing Jane's humiliation with a jitteriness that suggests someone genuinely unravelling rather than someone waiting for the third act. Tony Goldwyn shoots New York in the flat, warm, furniture catalogue style the genre insisted on at the time, and the film has no visual idea it did not borrow. The central conceit, that men behave like bulls who will not return to the same cow, works as satire in Laura Zigman's novel and becomes a trap on screen, because the movie has to endorse it for ninety minutes and then disown it.

Nothing bridges that gap. Greg Kinnear is well cast as a man whose warmth is a reflex he cannot switch off, and Hugh Jackman does something sly with Eddie, letting the serial charm curdle into loneliness in a short scene about his sister. Marisa Tomei is wasted on reaction shots. The final twenty minutes stop arguing and start arranging people into the positions the poster requires, which is the moment a film that briefly had a real idea decides not to keep it.