“License to Wed” has all the earmarks of the perfect Robin Williams vehicle. One, he gets to play a character so far outside the realm of reality that audiences should be riveted to their seats waiting to see what he does next. Two, he has the opportunity to adlib a lot and go completely nuts. Instead, Williams plays Reverend Frank too low-key in most spots and is too offensive in others. Sadly, most of his over-the-top behavior as the church pastor has been seen before, or is expected of him. When he’s playing catch with Ben Murphy (John Krasinski) and deliberately hits him in the nose with a baseball, Reverend Frank goes over to “heal” him. What spews out of his mouth is pure Robin Williams, but it’s Robin Williams that all his fans have heard before. As a result, that ...

  Your sister is getting married in another country. Your family is nutty. The best man is your ex-fiancée. Throw in a hired male gigolo as your wedding date, and you have the recipe for a quirky, yet rather enjoyable romantic comedy film. Kat Ellis (Debra Messing) lives her life alone in New York City. But when her estranged, half sister, Amy (Amy Adams) announces she is getting married in England, she is called upon to be the maid of honor. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But wait. What if the best man at your sister's wedding is your ex-fiancée, whom you are still smitten over? What to do? Well, how about hire a male hooker to be your wedding date? Dermot Mulroney plays Nick Mercer, a $6,000 male gigolo who Kat hires to make her ex-fiancée, Jeffrey, outrageously jealous. Little does Kat know, Jeffrey has no interest in resurrecting their "dumped ...

  You either get Julia Roberts or you don’t. Her dazzling smile either charms you or you react to it like fingernails on a blackboard. Fortunately, I’m in the former group—I get her. And I like her, a lot. When she’s cast well, as in “Notting Hill,” she’s a working demonstration of the term “movie star.” She owns the camera every moment she’s in view, and yet she’s generous to her costars. She’s a better actress than her detractors are likely ever to admit, and demonstrates it several times in this film—her last scene in the bookshop is a treasure: she’s in the moment, she delivers the lines like she’s thinking them up at the moment, and you can’t take your eyes off her. Not that most of us want to, so where the heck has she been lately? (I suspect off being a content wife and mother; more power to her.) In the ...

  “Rumor Has It” is a love story and journey of self-discovery and the meaning of ties to the past, but even with considerable star power, the movie has a tendency to simply trudge along to familiar plot points. Sarah Huttiger (Jennifer Aniston) is lost in her life, feeling alienated and distant from everything that she’s supposed to be happy about. She’s got a job that’s going nowhere, a family that she’s certain she was adopted into, and the perfect man who has just proposed to her. All of the things that are supposed to make her happy are bringing her grief, primarily because she’s unsettled in her own life. Then she finds out that her mother and grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) were involved with the same man. In fact, those relationships were the basis of the novel, “The Graduate.”. Not only that, but Sarah becomes convinced that the roguish Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) might actually ...