A nice, not thrilling run-through of conventions in the private-eye genre, taken at a totteringly slow tempo, and lowered in pitch for the gravelly voices of old-timers. Watching Paul Newman working with the likes of Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, Stockard Channing, and James Garner — wily veterans whetting some already pretty sharp dialogue — is a distinct pleasure. And if the seventy-something star has lost a little of his former vocal control, if intended inflections are apt to flatten out and intonations prone to wobble, the poignance more than compensates. The mystery plotting, neither very inventive nor very deceptive, is the work of a dilettante — the too cute The Late Show hardly established director Robert Benton as an expert in the field — though there's a deft bit of business by which the Hackman character discovers himself to be a cuckold. The camerawork by Piotr Sobocinski — Benton has never found an adequate replacement for the late Nestor Almendros — is clean and calm but also somewhat starchy and stiff. And it would be easy to overvalue the movie for the various extravagances it so scrupulously avoids. Reese Witherspoon, Liev Schreiber, Giancarlo Esposito. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd