One of the year's best, also one of Emma Thompson's best

Rating: 8/10 (30 November 2006)

More notable for its full characters than even for its quirky plot machinations, this film is a masterpiece of character and dialog, theme and counter-theme. The ironies are subtle, and the momentum hushed, too hushed at times. It is, though it doesn't seem it, a work that demands close attention to its allusions, both in word and in image.
I generally like Emma Thompson's work, and hers was one of the most intimately fleshed characters I've seen on the screen in quite some time.
I really enjoyed the cinematography, as it made the occasional ironic architectural comment or thematic punctuation. I find cinematographer Roberto Schaefer's camera style paces like a dialog between angle and subject. And recognizing places in my beloved Chicago didn't hurt, either.
(SPOILER follows -- if you haven't seen the film, skip this last sentence.) If the film suffered most from any one thing, it was the lack of additional insight in the inevitability of the ending.