Popular Amy Brenneman Products

For a while, the cast is appealing enough, and the design is House Beautiful enough, to camouflage the Fatal flaws that turn the second half into an overblown, predictable snicker-fest.

Though the explosion that seals off New York and New Jersey will have even curious theater concession stand crews bolting their posts, the characterizations are strictly low-cal.

Breaking up, jealousies, match making and a bid for second chances are the themes of this vibrant and uplifting film that explores life, love and desire.

The Jane Austen Book Club, based on Karen Joy Fowler's bestseller, offers a distinctive vision of hell - a plane of being where there are only six novels that matter, and they're consulted like all-purpose agony aunts.

If the stories sometimes use Creative Writing 101 devices (like a quasi-prophetic homeless woman), the total effect is as spare and haunting as the film's arid, beautifully shot setting.

A collection of five femme-oriented vignettes that are not intricately linked dramatically but overlap characters, this observant, emotionally acute drama is distinguished by a pronounced poetic sensibility in its writing and visual style.

This honorable follow-up to LaBute's stunning debut, In the Company of Men, which also dissects sexual politics, is well acted by the entire ensemble.

It is superbly executed and, for all its pitilessness, it's an intelligent dramatization of the impact that consumerist values have had on the psyche of the North American middle class at the end of the 20th century.

Quiet and quirky, yet refreshingly unpretentious, Off the Map is a welcome sojourn in a place that seems strange, yet entirely familiar.

[A] lovely film, which hardly ever makes a move that feels wrong.

Don't bother

Interestingly, the more overblown and insincere a performance Pacino delivers in a film, the more self-important and bouffant his hair gets. Here, it's so towering it takes up 90 per cent of the screen.