Time-travel romance (or in the words of the whiz-kid Cupid who makes it happen, "a 4-D pretzel of kismetic inevitability") uniting a Type-A Manhattan career woman and a 19th-century British duke, who tumbles through a time-portal into the present day. The matching of Meg Ryan -- tossing around and peering through a grass-skirt haircut -- with Hugh Jackman almost transforms it into an older-woman-younger-man thing, to boot, but that only underscores the novelettish swoony-mooniness of it. (All that perky, plucky, ditzy, daffy stuff of Ryan's has doubtless gotten a little old. It got there a little ahead of Ryan herself.) The woman's chosen career, market research, sanctions a satirical dig at modern filmmaking practices -- "You people with your tests!" fumes the movie's actual director, James Mangold, in a cameo. "You're sucking the life out of American cinema!" -- but this comes ill from a movie which itself is pure manipulation and massage. Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer, Natasha Lyonne. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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