Joan Chen's worlds-apart followup to her first film, Xiu Xiu, the Sent-Down Girl, brings together Richard Gere and Winona Ryder as the perfect couple: he'll never grow up, and she'll never grow old. (Peter Pan Complex and heart condition, respectively.) A cure is possible, for either or both, but not for the movie as a whole: a cold-blooded tearjerker in the end, and in the meantime a cold-blooded drool-jerker (trendy East Side eaterie, avant-garde millinery, nouvelle cuisine for breakfast, formal-dress museum benefit, Halloween costume party, ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, and so on). You can see why Gere, figurehead of the You-Are-Your-Hair religion, would have said yes to the job: the script describes him variously as "charming," "fabulous," and "forty-eight." The pixie-haired Ryder, cheating even worse on her age, is said to be twenty-two. (Tinkerbell Complex, maybe?) While those two try to out-cute one another, the movie is stolen right from under them by Elaine Stritch, an old broad who looks and sounds as if she knows her way around a liquor cabinet. (Accepting a hug at a birthday bash: "Careful the cocktail!" And greeting a guest at her front door: "Care for a cock-a-tail?") With Anthony LaPaglia, Vera Farmiga, and Sherry Stringfield. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.