Sleepless In Seattle

Tom Hanks plays a lonely widower and architect who moves with his little boy (Ross Malinger) from Chicago to Seattle; Meg Ryan plays a newspaper reporter in Baltimore who’s preparing to get married. One night she hears the architect on a radio call-in show, falls madly in love with him, and writes him a letter; his son tries to encourage a match between them. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed this, repeatedly alludes to the 1957 An Affair to Remember as her principal point of reference, yet at no point does she indicate any awareness of what makes that tragicomic love story sublime and this one merely cutesy. If one can ignore all the straining for lightness here, this is watchable enough, though hardly anything resembling a tearjerker. With Bill Pullman, Rosie O’Donnell, and Rob Reiner (1993). PG, 105 min. (JR)

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