Love & Sex

Not-so-successful journalist Kate Welles (Famke Janssen), the beleaguered protagonist of Valerie Breiman's film, decides that her life has been a series of what-ifs taken and rejected -- affairs with men that fizzled. So when her imperious editor (Anne Magnuson) gives her till the end of the day to write an article about successful relationships that doesn't include detailed descriptions of blow jobs, Kate rambles into her tape recorder about her time with Adam (Jon Favreau), a bad painter and a big-bodied doofus who was the love of her life and, more important, her "best friend." Confusing matters are Adam's annoying personal habits, Kate's flings with a wanna-be Robert De Niro and a would-be bigamist, and Breiman's less-than-graceful flashback structure. About halfway through Love, you might realize that you've seen this movie before -- maybe not with Woody Allen, but certainly with John Cusack in High Fidelity. Which begs the question, is it progress when women switch roles with the whiny guys who struggle to understand them?

-- Peter Keough