Nights in Rodanthe
Director: George C. Wolfe
Starring: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, James Franco, Christopher Meloni, Scott Glenn, Viola Davis
Rating: (PG)
3 stars (out of 5)
Review by Christine Powley
When I saw The Notebook I thought it overdid the sentimentality but after watching Nights in Rodanthe (Rialto) I found myself looking back on The Notebook as a piece of towering genius.
The two films are both adaptations of Nicholas Sparks novels and if nothing else, confirm my resolve never to read anything by Sparks.
Diane Lane plays Adrienne Willis, a woman who lost herself in marriage and children, then, when her husband dumped her for another woman, floundered.
When we meet her, Adrienne is just starting to find her feet.
She is heading off to open her best friend's guesthouse for an out-of-season booking, who turns out to be Richard Gere - a doctor tormented by an operation that went wrong and his estrangement from his son.
A storm is brewing and over the course of some wine-fuelled meals the troubled twosome unburden their souls and find true love.
Adrienne teaches the doctor compassion and he helps reconnect her to her younger self. Gere and Lane bring a lot of heart to this but the storyline is so colour-by-numbers it is hard to get too swept away.
I found my interest caught most strongly by the incredible wooden gingerbread guesthouse built right on the shoreline.
You know a movie is not working when you start obsessing about the scenery.
Best thing: Diane Lane. Could someone please put her in a film worthy of her talent because that is a film I want to see.
Worse thing: The plot is a cliché-filled stinker.
See it with: A clean handkerchief.
Traitor
Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Starring: Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Saïd Taghmaoui, Neal McDonough, Alvy Khan, Archie Panjabe, Raad Rawi
Rating: (M)
2 stars (out of 5)
Review by Mark Orton
FBI agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) and his bad-cop partner Max Archer (Neal McDonough) are on the hunt for Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), a former US special-forces officer suspected of trafficking explosives.
Unfortunately for Samir, he has recently rediscovered his Islamic roots, setting off terrorist alarm bells with the good Baptist Clayton.
But, when you cast Don Cheadle as a bad guy, it's always going to be a hard sell to convince the audience that the Hotel Rwanda Good Samaritan is capable of atrocity.
Perhaps he isn't?
"The truth certainly is complicated," mutters Samir as he wrestles with his conscience, though not nearly as much as the film does to pull a plot out of an awkward muddle of locations, languages, allegiances and stereotypes.
Traitor has the ingredients to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but subtlety isn't its strongest suit.
It attempts to deal an even hand by alluding to dodgy American foreign intelligence, but spends far too much time giving an insight into dark-skinned men wrestling with Semtex-laden vests.
Best thing: Guy Pearce's Sta-Prest FBI uniform.
Worst thing: Too predictable, too long and too Western-centric.
See it with: A Republican supporter.
