Between Strangers Movie Review

Between Strangers? Hmmm, sounds like a softcore porn movie. Turns out it's a weepy melodrama starring a generation-bounding collection of movie stars.

Ever since Short Cuts won accolades, we get a yearly version of this movie, a sometimes thoughtful collection of stories, none large enough to stand alone as a feature film, some to slight to merit any attention at all. Between Strangers mitigates this problem by focusing on the stories of three women, all wrestling with past mistakes or old regrets.

There's Olivia (Sophia Loren(!)), whose sketching is disapproved of by her husband (Pete Postlethwaite) and who gave up a child for adoption years ago. Natalia's (Mira Sorvino) war-torn photos appear on the cover of Time, but she desperately wants to know what happened to one celebrated subject. Finally, Catherine (Deborah Unger), plays cello and hates dad (Malcolm McDowell), because he did something nasty to mom decades ago... and now Catherine appears to be despised by her s.o. as well.

The stories are very loosely intertwined (no, neither of the younger actresses turns out to be Loren's lost daughter), all coming together in a fairly depressing but mildly satisfying finale. The direction is solid and the acting is universally good but rather one-note. There's a lot of crying and tearing of hair, all designed to get you to do the same.