By now, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have amassed such a fund of goodwill with moviegoers that any new onscreen pairing brings nearly reflexive smiles. In You've Got Mail, the quintessential boy and girl next door repeat the tentative romantic crescendo that made Sleepless in Seattle, writer-director Nora Ephron's previous excursion with the duo, a massive hit. The prospective couple do actually meet face to face early on but Mail otherwise repeats the earlier feature's gentle, extended tease of saving its romantic resolution until the final, gauzy shot. The underlying narrative is an even more old-fashioned romantic pas de deux that is casually hooked to a newfangled device. The script, cowritten by the director and her sister, Delia Ephron, updates and relocates the Ernst Lubitsch classic, The Shop Around the Corner, to contemporary Manhattan, where Joe Fox (Hanks) is a cheerfully rapacious merchant whose chain of book superstores is gobbling up smaller, more specialized shops such as the children's bookstore owned by Kathleen Kelly (Ryan). Their lives run in close parallel in the same idealized neighbourhood yet they first meet anonymously, online, where they gradually nurture a warm, even intimate correspondence. As they begin to wonder whether this e-mail flirtation might lead them to be soul mates, however, they meet and clash over their colliding business fortunes. It's no small testament to the two stars that we wind up liking and caring about them despite the inevitable (and highly manipulative) arc of the plot. Although their chemistry transcended the consciously improbable romantic premise of Sleepless, enabling director Ephron to attain a kind of amorous soufflé, this time around there's a slow leak that considerably deflates the affair. Less credulous viewers will challenge Joe's logic in prolonging the concealment of his online identity from Kathleen, and may shake their heads at Ephron's reinvention of Manhattan as a spotless, sun-dappled wonderland where everybody lives in million-dollar apartments and colour co-ordinates their wardrobes for cocktail parties. [+]

Set in LA among the same narcissistic, vain and pop culture-obsessed generation already celebrated in Kevin Smith's Clerks and Doug Liman's Swingers, Free Enterprise is a smart-aleck comedy that consciously holds a mirror up to the lives of twenty- and thirtysomethings everywhere. Anyone who grew up in the shadows of Star Trek and Star Wars will find plenty to laugh about and identify with here. The loose premise follows two self-professed geeks: Mark (Eric McCormack), in a delightful spin on Logan's Run, is agonising about reaching his 30th birthday before he has achieved anything much at all, while his slacker pal Robert (Rafer Wiegel) neglects his daytime editing job to woo a comic-reading, nerdy yet totally babelicious wish-fulfilment girlfriend. The great joy of the movie, however, is not the constant parade of witty movie in-jokes, but the appearance of William Shatner as himself. He plays a washed-up, boozy actor desperately touting to anyone who will listen his idea for "William Shatner's William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: The Musical" (words W. Shakespeare, music W. Shatner), displaying all the while a refreshing gift for comic understatement. Shatner brings real pathos and self-deprecating humour to the depiction of the gulf between the other characters' hero-worship of his on-screen persona and his subjective reality as a misunderstood actor. By the time he gets round to performing a mind-boggling bizarre rap version of Marc Anthony's soliloquy, the ageing Captain Kirk has redeemed himself, both in the eyes of the characters and the viewing audience. -Mark Walker.

The complete obscurity of Avanti is a cinematic injustice that needs to be rectified. Jack Lemmon and director Billy Wilder made their share of hits together (Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, for starters), but this wry, melancholy comedy was completely out of touch with its time (which recalls a Wilder one-liner from the 1970s: "Who the hell would want to be in touch with these times?"). It may have flopped badly in 1972, but it wears well in retrospect. Lemmon plays a jerk American businessman called to Italy to pick up the body of his father, who died while enjoying a secret (and, it turns out, annual) liaison with a mistress. With the help of a delightful Englishwoman (Juliet Mills) who happens to be the daughter of the "other woman", Lemmon finds himself stepping in a few of dad's footsteps, and falling under the sway of the beguiling Italian atmosphere. It's a very leisurely movie, but that's part of the effect. Clive Revill delivers a gem of a performance as a heroic hotel manager, and Juliet Mills (sister of Hayley, daughter of Sir John) had her finest screen hour here. As a director, Wilder spent much of his early career camouflaging his romantic streak under a cynical front; here, despite many acerbic touches and the presence of death as the central plot device, the romance is in full flower under the rich Italian sun. -Robert Horton, Amazon. com.

A contemporary comedy of bizarre situations.

Coasting on the successes of Gods and Monsters and George of the Jungle, Brendan Fraser turns in yet another winning performance in this fish-out-of-water comedy in which Pleasantville meets modern-day Los Angeles, with predictably funny results. Fraser stars as Adam, who was born in the bomb shelter of his paranoid inventor dad (a less-manic-than-usual Christopher Walken), who spirited his pregnant wife (Sissy Spacek, in fine comic form) underground when he thought the Communists dropped the bomb (actually, it was a plane crash). Armed with enough supplies to last 35 years, the parents bring up Adam in Leave It to Beaver style with nary any exposure to the outside world. When the supplies run out, and dad suffers a heart attack, Fraser goes up to modern-day LA for some shopping and long-awaited culture shock. More of a cute premise with lots of clever ideas attached than a fully fleshed out story, Blast from the Past is also supposed to be part romantic comedy, as the hunky Adam hooks up with his jaded Eve (Alicia Silverstone) and tries to convince her to marry him and go underground. The sparks don't fly, though, because Silverstone is saddled with the triple whammy of being miscast, playing an underwritten character, and suffering a very bad hairdo. Fraser, however, carries the film lightly and easily on his broad, goofy shoulders, mixing Adam's gee-whiz innocence with genuine emotion and curiosity; only Fraser could pull off Adam's first glimpse of a sunrise or the ocean with both humour and pathos. Also winning is Dave Foley as Silverstone's gay best friend, who manages to make the most innocuous statements sound like comic gems. - Mark Englehart, Amazon. com.

A man is frightened to death by a menacing military helicopter, piloted by two young Texan men who just happen to be the dead man's stepsons, Dorian and Angus (Luke Wilson and Jake Busey). To complicate matters, the dead man had had an affair with young Sally (Drew Barrymore), a clerk at the local Burger-Matic who didn't know the guy was married. Now she's pregnant and looking for a supportive guy to be her unborn child's potential father. Dorian fits the role quite nicely, but Angus thinks Sally knows about the helicopter incident, and their scheming mother (Catherine O'Hara) is trying to mastermind a cover-up, and. So goes the cleverly amusing plot of this light, character-based romantic comedy, which proves Barrymore's charm and versatility once again, gives O'Hara one of her best roles, and moves right along at its own amiable pace. Small-town romance combines with darkly tinged comedy (scripted by X-Files staffer Vince Gilligan), and first-time director Dean Parisot guides it all with casual assurance. There's nothing going on in Home Fries that's particularly inspired, but Barrymore and Wilson (an off-screen couple during production) make a delightful pair, and the cast makes the most of some hilarious down-home dialogue. All in all, a very pleasant diversion. [+]