capsule reviews

notting hill, truly madly deeply, barbara stanwyck

Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman in Truly, Madly, Deeply (source)

Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999)

Oh to run a bookshop in an expensive metro area that does no business but apparently does not need to. I would dearly love one of these Richard Scarry Busytown–esque romcom jobs, where you putter around a failing business and live comfortably somehow.

I had never seen this classic of the modern romcom, which pits Julia Roberts’s smiling American winsomeness against Hugh Grant’s dry English self-deprecation. It did not totally work for me. Roberts and Grant are both too charming and too aware of it to have chemistry with each other rather than with the audience and the camera. When Julia Roberts smiles, it’s like the sun rises… but for me, not Hugh Grant. The little nods to Henry James throughout felt like they were trying to invoke a certain tradition of spiri…