The first love of physicist Richard Feynman (not counting science), a childhood sweetheart doomed to an early tubercular death while her new husband helped build the A-bomb. There is plenty of sweetness; plenty, thanks to the main character, of eccentricity (his bloodhound experiment to detect the scent of his beloved on a Coke bottle); plenty of mind-spinning mirth from the unusual source of scientific jargon ("Some nuclei are unstable, so the neutrons fall off of them ..."); some believable intimacy (the parted mates' habit of tearing up love letters before mailing, for piecing together after receipt); and some ambitious contemplation of the place of individual lives in the grand scheme. Matthew Broderick doesn't really dig into a scene as director (his first attempt), though he remains a boyishly engaging presence on screen, if not still so boyish that he can get away with stepping into the hero's life at the age of sixteen. With Patricia Arquette and Peter Riegert; written by Patricia Broderick, Matthew's mother. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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