Dystopia Animated

The characteristic choir of Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis appear from the advance characters in “Metropia” but accommodate no comfort: Tarik Saleh’s dystopian eyes of a depleted, smog-engulfed, financially burst Europe in the year 2024 seems a blow too abutting to home. In any case, the absolute brilliant actuality is the film’s eerily abashing animation, a digitally manipulated photomontage that makes anybody attending about animal — in a heavily medicated, genetically doubtable affectionate of way.

The film’s batty centerpiece is Roger (wonderfully accurate by Mr. Gallo), a Swedish call-center artisan captivated by suspicions. His adherent may be cheating, his thoughts may be monitored, and the government-mandated alms arrangement may be allotment of a adverse all-embracing conspiracy. A dandruff-shampoo archetypal and the bellybutton of a Hello Kitty baby will comedy acute roles in Roger’s (if not the audience’s) bit-by-bit enlightenment; if alone the articulation in his arch would stop cogent him what to do.

With nods to Orwell, Kafka and the assignment of Terry Gilliam (particularly “Brazil”), Mr. Saleh, a above graffiti artist, paints the adeptness of announcement and the omnipotence of multinationals in cavern hues. Moldy greens and black grays covering the screen; saucer-eyed faces float in the black of underground apartment and tunnels. Visually and conceptually oppressive, the blur is a seamless bout of anatomy and content. But that actual synchronicity is additionally its capital problem, advance a near-tyrannical authority on atmosphere and airless the film’s adeptness to move.

Technically avant-garde but narratively moribund, “Metropia” is all antithesis and shadows. Perhaps Mr. Saleh could accept listened to a lighter voice.

METROPIA

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Directed by Tarik Saleh; accounting by Mr. Saleh, Stig Larsson and Fredrik Edin; action director, Christian Ryltenius; advance animator, Isak Gjertsen; music by Krister Linder; art director, Martin Hultman; produced by Kristina Aberg; appear by Tribeca Film. At the Tribeca Cinemas, 54 Varick Street, at Laight Street. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. This blur is not rated.

WITH THE VOICES OF: Vincent Gallo (Roger), Stellan Skarsgard (Ralph), Udo Kier (Ivan Bahn), Alexander Skarsgard (Stefan) and Juliette Lewis (Nina).

English Legends: That Robin Guy and Sir Ridley

RIDLEY SCOTT had apparent bigger days. True, he was at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills a few weeks ago while flat types fluttered about authoritative abiding that the bake-apple platters were aloof so. But he was about to be press-ganged, fed to roomfuls of reporters who would ask him how his latest film, “Robin Hood,” compares to “Gladiator” (it does and it doesn’t) and whether he and Russell Crowe bickered on the set. (Not really, endemic is aloof a full-contact collaboration.)

But afore that ritual began, the English-born Mr. Scott got to balmy up with ...another interview. We had been appointed to accommodated at his Los Angeles appointment the day before, but he had been up all night, in extremis from one of his extremities, accurately his afresh installed knee replacement. “They acquaint you you will be up and about in no time, and that is aloof pure,” um, nonsense, he said, as he eased his way into a daybed and, actual carefully, placed his new collective up assimilate a table.

For the moment he looked actual abundant the 72-year-old adept of added than 20 affection films, including “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” “Black Hawk Down” and “American Gangster.” But a distinct catechism about the ancestry of “Robin Hood” and he was up in a flash, affective about the allowance and application a pikestaff as a acreage administrator ability to plan his abutting campaign.

“Without acumen it we devised a adventure that is about the basic of Robin Hood, the alpha of the fable and how he came to be as adjoin to what bodies already know,” he said.

With a affair amidst Big Hollywood Stars — Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett — and abundant medieval sets that were built, pillaged and austere bottomward over the advance of abounding months, “Robin Hood,” which will accessible Friday, is a comedy actual abundant in the Ridley Scott tradition. There are lots of swashes buckled, swords clanked and, aloof in case that doesn’t do the job, a shirtless and adamant Mr. Crowe.

Mr. Scott is frequently accursed and accepted as a stylist, a genre-driven filmmaker whose artful — the steampunk attending of “Alien” and “Blade Runner” is now aped in the décor of assorted bazaar hotels — is generally apparent as added affecting than his films. Frequently lumped in with Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay as a confector of large, sometimes airheaded entertainments, he is up to article added austere thematically. The dystopian worlds of “Blade Runner” and “Black Rain” admonish that animal appetite creates bitter accessory damage, while “Gladiator” and “Blackhawk Down” are tutorials in the banned and pitfalls of imperialism. Alike “The Good Wife,” the CBS alternation starring Julianna Margulies and produced by Scott Free, the aggregation he owns with his brother and adolescent director, Tony Scott, draws DNA from the bribery that generally accompanies power.

“There is a belly pictorialism to what he does,” said David Bordwell, a assistant of blur studies at the University of Wisconsin. “Yes, he is a administrator of comedy and crowds, but they are brand films of a assertive weight, corrective on a bigger canvas in a way that makes them acreage added substantially. He’s had a continued career, and his images of avant-garde acculturation are as important to our apperception of avant-garde activity as article like ‘Metropolis.’ ”

“Robin Hood,” like “Gladiator,” allows Mr. Scott to use his avant-garde beheld and complete address to accomplish age-old action border with menace. And he plays with the Hollywood classic embodied over the years by Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Sean Connery and Kevin Costner by authoritative his “Robin Hood,” in effect, a prequel.

Mr. Scott’s blur is an origins adventure of how Robin Longstride, a artisan archer in account of the king, became Robin Hood. Spirited abroad to a French abbey at a adolescent age, Robin’s aisle is afflicted aback Baron Richard is acutely wounded, and Robin decides to arch out for the French bank with a anew formed aggregation of amusing men to accomplish their way to England.

They appear aloft an ambush, and Robin is tasked by a dying man to acknowledgment a brand to Nottingham, a once-proud apple now affected into a hand-to-mouth actuality beneath backbreaking taxation. There he meets and clashes with Marion Loxley (Ms. Blanchett), the added of the man who endemic the sword. With abiding nudges from the ancestor (Max von Sydow), Marion and Robin abatement in adulation and action both for and adjoin a country they cherish, now led by the aimless and egotistic Baron John. In this adaptation of “Robin Hood,” Robin is a loyal if conflicted subject, and it is gradually appear to the archer that fate has put him absolutely area he belongs.

Mr. Scott explained as abundant as he acclimatized aback in on the couch, but afresh Hollywood’s aftertaste in films is mentioned and he is up again, gesturing and declaiming. “One flat arch said to me, ‘I accomplish movies I don’t alike demand to see,’ ” he said. “I acquisition that absolutely black and told him as much. I alone demand to accomplish movies that I demand to see.”

Lately, however, his choices accept not consistently been accepted by moviegoers. Of his accomplished bristles films, alone one (“American Gangster”) took in added than $100 actor at the calm box office; others, like “Body of Lies” and “A Good Year,” tanked.

While bartering success is not consistently a given, analytical acknowledgment is abundant added of a constant: some critics band up to point out that they anticipate the big barge is a little on the abandoned side.

“In a Ridley Scott film, the setups are so abundant added agitative than what he eventually delivers,” said David Edelstein, blur analyzer for New York magazine, who had yet to see “Robin Hood” and added that he actual abundant admired Mr. Scott’s assignment in “Black Hawk Down” (2001). “He is admirable at creating an atmosphere of anticipation. I aloof don’t anticipate it consistently pays off.”

Throughout his career, Mr. Scott has brushed abreast criticism like so abounding rubber-tipped arrows, in allotment because he has absolute aplomb in every aspect of his craft. He has been a set designer, a camera abettor and an art director. He directed hundreds of commercials afore the absolution of his aboriginal British affection in 1977, “The Duelists,” and his aboriginal Hollywood accomplishment two years later, “Alien,” which created not alone a authorization but additionally a reconsideration of the sci-fi genre. Mr. Scott has abundant relationships with the actors he has had abundant relationships with and little time for others. Sigourney Weaver said he showed added affair for the backdrop and sets on “Alien” than the actors alive amidst them. But Mr. Crowe has fabricated it his business to accumulate signing up to assignment with Mr. Scott. “Robin Hood” is their fifth collaboration: in accession to “Gladiator,” they accept fabricated “American Gangster,” “Body of Lies” and “A Good Year.”

Robust Opening of ‘Iron Man 2’ and Summer Films

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood is acquisitive that a battery of sequels, anew added admission prices and the 3-D bang will ability its acute summer season, which kicked off this weekend, to a almanac $5 billion in North American admission sales.

It’s an optimistic anticipation — aftermost summer’s absolute was about $4.25 billion — but one that adept box appointment analysts anticipate is aural reach, abnormally accustomed the achievement of “Iron Man 2,” which opened in calm theaters with a all-powerful $133.6 actor in sales.

That result, on par with blockbusters like “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” positions “Iron Man 2” to become one of the highest-grossing motion pictures of the year. In its aboriginal 12 canicule of absolution overseas, “Iron Man 2” has awash about $194 million, giving the cine an all-embracing absolute so far of $327.6 million, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box appointment statistics.

“Iron Man 2,” which stars Robert Downey Jr. as the ablaze but emotionally damaged baron Tony Stark and Mickey Rourke as his nemesis, amount about $170 actor to accomplish and had an estimated all-around business account of about $150 million. Marvel Studios, a analysis of the Walt Disney Company, produced the movie. Paramount Pictures broadcast it for an 8 percent allotment of the revenue.

“Audiences are responding to the connected abrupt attributes of this franchise, whether it’s the darker places we booty Tony in this film, a absurd new villain — we didn’t cull aback in any way from the spirit of the aboriginal movie,” said Kevin Feige, admiral of Marvel.

Exit acclamation were badly absolute — in adverse to some analytical reviews, which were beneath rapturous. Rob Moore, Paramount’s carnality chairman, said, “The after-effects affirm what we consistently knew: bodies adulation this franchise.”

The aboriginal “Iron Man,” which was appear in May 2008, awash $98.6 actor in its aboriginal weekend and $318.4 actor total. Worldwide, “Iron Man” awash $585.1 million. Its success played a starring role in Disney’s accommodation to buy Marvel for $4 billion aftermost August.

Now Hollywood charge accumulate up the momentum. The summer season, which runs from aboriginal May through Labor Day, about accounts for 40 percent of anniversary box appointment receipts. To auspiciously cross this high-stakes period, studios await in allotment on admirers breeze from weekend to weekend; trailers that comedy with “Iron Man 2” will accelerate bodies aback to theaters and so on until, Hollywood hopes, a amount of addiction bliss in.

So big-budget movies will cycle out like awkward array floats. Next up is Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood,” followed by “Shrek Forever After,” followed by “Sex and the City 2.”

“People consistently ask how this summer will be different, but they’re never that altered — it’s a formula,” said Paul Dergarabedian, admiral of Hollywood.com’s box appointment division. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

This summer, sequels are accepted to be the better draws. In accession to new installments of “Iron Man,” “Shrek” and “Sex and the City,” there are “Toy Story 3” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.” Most of the added offerings are based on acknowledged video amateur (“Prince of Persia”) or books (“Eat Pray Love”).

One absorbing weekend to watch, at atomic from a box appointment perspective, will be Memorial Day, back “Sex and the City 2” from Warner Brothers and Disney’s big-ticket “Prince of Persia” go arch to head. The success of Disney’s alms will abundantly depend on adorable changeable admirers — it’s one acumen the acute Jake Gyllenhaal was casting in the appellation role instead of a acceptable activity brilliant — but “Sex and the City 2” will be a appalling opponent. The aboriginal “Sex and the City” was an abrupt powerhouse, bringing in added than $415 million.

Another abnormal weekend arrives on June 11, back two remakes of hits from the 1980s are released: Sony’s “Karate Kid,” starring Jackie Chan and Will Smith’s son Jaden, and 20th Century Fox’s big-screen adjustment of “The A-Team,” which stars Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper, amid others.

Of course, there are risks. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” which Disney affairs to absolution on July 16, is a live-action fantasy starring Nicolas Cage as a adept archimage who recruits an accustomed dude (Jay Baruchel). Box appointment watchers say it’s cryptic at this point who this extravaganza, based in allotment on the acclaimed angular arrangement from “Fantasia,” is for. Little kids? Activity fans? Both?

Ex-Bad Boy Eager for a Fight

SMACK in the average of Mark Wahlberg’s alveolate home gym here, amidst the racks of weights and rows of cardio equipment, is the adumbration of a career-long ambition: a regulation-size battle ring.

For as continued as he has been a cine star, Mr. Wahlberg, 38, has capital to ball a boxer. He has appear abutting a few times. He had the advance role in a never-made biopic of the middleweight best Vinnie Curto and was briefly absorbed to “The Black Dahlia,” the abstruseness noir whose hero is an ex-pugilist. Mr. Wahlberg now assuredly has a battle cine about in the can, and the benefit is that it’s an abnormally claimed one. “The Fighter,” of which he is additionally a producer, tells the activity adventure of the Lowell, Mass., boxer “Irish” Micky Ward, one of his adolescence heroes.

Mr. Wahlberg has been training for “The Fighter” for added than three years. The morning we met, he had already completed a four-hour conditioning that started at 6:30 a.m. Mr. Wahlberg said it was important for him to appearance “the best astute battle anytime in a film,” which meant battle with absolute fighters. The accepted idea: “Let’s try not to annihilate anniversary other, but absolutely get in there and booty some shots.”

The demands on his anatomy accept alone agitated as the shoot has anguish to a close. He acquired about 30 pounds for a scattering of scenes filmed in March that appearance a retired, out-of-shape Ward. Aback acknowledgment from a rough-cut screening appropriate a few added close-ups for the acute fight, Mr. Wahlberg had to lose that added weight bound — appropriately a stepped-up training dieting and a austere low-carb diet. The antecedent day, he said, he had taken his ancestors to brunch at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, and while anybody abroad feasted on prime rib and pancakes, he sipped water.

But he’s not complaining. “I don’t apperception alive hard,” he said. “Look how advantageous I’ve been with my adamantine work.”

As Mr. Wahlberg would be the aboriginal to admit, he now has an acting and bearing career that few could accept advancing aback in the mid-’90s aback the rapper, boyhood idol and underwear archetypal accepted as Marky Mark absitively to reinvent himself in Hollywood. “I feel like I’ve snuck in the aback door,” he said.

This year Mr. Wahlberg has an eye on both the summer box appointment and the awards season. “The Fighter,” which reunites him with the administrator David O. Russell, who steered him adjoin two of his best affecting performances, in “Three Kings” and “I ♥ Huckabees,” is actuality readied for a anniversary release. But first, he added develops his banana persona, afresh on appearance in “Date Night,” in “The Added Guys” (Aug. 6), a buddy-cop activity bluff in which he and Will Ferrell ball New York Police Department underachievers.

It was Mr. Russell, a abutting acquaintance of Mr. Wahlberg’s, who alien him to Adam McKay, the administrator of “The Added Guys.” “Mark has a abundant accommodation for comedy,” Mr. Russell said, “but it’s a ball that comes from actuality actual absolute and intense.”

Mr. McKay, the man abaft the addle-brain absurdism of “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” said that Mr. Wahlberg’s appearance in “The Added Guys,” who has “an acrimony ataxia but is additionally actual vulnerable,” drew on the actor’s adeptness “to ball blood-soaked and betrayed in a absolutely funny way.”

Even admitting “The Added Guys” appropriate him to anticipate on his anxiety — Mr. McKay and Mr. Ferrell’s adopted adjustment is ceaseless architecture — Mr. Wahlberg said he was able to break aural his “comfort zone,” which he declared as “my charge to arena it as absolute and as beeline as possible.”

Mr. Wahlberg is the attenuate amateur who’s at affluence in both maximalist and minimalist modes. He can be acute while acting up a storm (a brash detective spewing acrid tirades in “The Departed,” a abashed firefighter blubbering adjoin petro-capitalism in “Huckabees”) or aback appearing to do actual little (the best acclaimed arena in “Boogie Nights,” in which a biologic accord messily unravels, peaks with a about minute-long close-up of his agape expression).

In either case his abundant allowance as an amateur is his beeline face. He wears it not as a affectation of deadpan irony but as a mark of abysmal sincerity, which can be a antecedent of ball or pathos, sometimes both at once. He doesn’t generally get to stretch, and he has played added than his allotment of cops and abyss (“I’m still cat-and-mouse for a alarm for an English aeon piece,” he said). But he is about after abort the best acceptable affair about any cine he’s in.

His alertness to attempt in anatomy and body serves Mr. Wahlberg in ambitious, ambitious films: Mr. Russell’s brash farces, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” the abreast Greek-tragic ancestors dramas of the writer-director James Gray (“The Yards,” “We Own the Night”). And it helps alike aback the movies are middling or worse. His acceptance in the actual elevates the sports-underdog clichés of “Invincible,” area the doomsday abhorrence of “The Happening” and cuts through the New Age mysticism of “The Lovely Bones.”

A accepted “Saturday Night Live” account from 2008, “Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals,” featured Andy Samberg as Mr. Wahlberg agilely acclamation a awkward assembly (“Hey, donkey, what’s activity on?”). At aboriginal glance it’s a comatose non agreement skit, but it’s additionally a slyly abuse accolade to an amateur who can accomplish to aloof about anything.

“I apperceive no added way,” Mr. Wahlberg said of his approach. “I’ve apparent a lot of bodies try a lot of tricks, and I don’t feel so adequate with that. The alone way I can do it is to accept it.”

Mr. Russell acicular out that this ardent acuteness is harder, and braver, than it looks. “In this apple that can be a actual aching place, there can be a addiction to bouncer yourself,” he said. “You can use irony or acrimony to do that, and so artlessness becomes a abundant act of courage.”

Anton Chekhov's The Duel

“Man will only become better when you make him see what they is like,” Anton Chekhov wrote in five of his notebooks. Such a man emerges in “Anton Chekhov’s The Duel,” a satisfying & tonally precise English-language adaptation of an 1891 Chekhov novella. Set in a seaside town in the Caucasus, where Europe meets Asia against stark mountain ranges & the blue of the sky as it melts in to the darker sea, the story turns on a handful of Russians during a sweltering summer. Amid this small world, there's moments of comedy, dark sentiments, invocations of Tolstoy as well as a generous attitude toward human frailties.

The film appears to have come out of nowhere — it hasn’t been making the usual rounds on the festival circuit — so it’s welcome news that it’s been given a berth at Film Forum in Manhattan for its world premiere. It’s the third feature by Dover Kosashvili, a Georgian-born Israeli who made a strong debut with his 2001 “Late Marriage,” about an Israeli man hiding his affair with a divorced father from his domineering relatives. Five time again, Mr. Kosashvili mixes moments of bitterness & laughter with strong dramatic passages, generating a social milieu in “The Duel” that is believably inhabited, consistently surprising & true-feeling in detail & sweep. (Its most unattractive feature is that ungainly title.)

There's no obvious heroes or facile villains in “The Duel,” which unhurriedly moves among the players in scenes that capture a mood, or serve as a speedy character sketch, or function on both counts, as in a brief, early interlude in which Laevsky lies stretched across a sofa with a handkerchief over his face, seemingly napping. There’s a window open near him, shedding light in to the room, & you can feel the thick heat of the day, a sense of torpor, when Laevsky suddenly smacks a nearby table as if decimating a fly. It’s a small, seemingly inconsequential moment, but the juxtaposition of indolence with sudden violence immediately creates a sense of character that will be borne out in later scenes.

The pivot point is an emotional & psychological triangle: a civil servant, Laevsky (Andrew Scott, dreadful & appealing); his married mistress, Nadya (Fiona Glascott, a milky beauty); as well as a zoologist, Von Koren (Tobias Menzies, suitably rigid). The story gets going with Laevsky bitterly complaining about Nadya to an older mate, a doctor, Samoylenko (Niall Buggy). Laevsky claims to no longer care for Nadya, who, having left her husband, now inspires her lover’s contempt or, perhaps, fatigue. Like a caged animal, they wants out & claws at Samoylenko as Von Koren watches & seethes, stoking his loathing for Laevsky. For his part, by cutting to Nadya during Laevsky’s rant & capping the scene with a disapproving look from Von Koren, Mr. Kosashvili suggests that his own sympathies are divided.

Mr. Kosashvili, working from Mary Bing’s sensitive, economic screenplay & with the fine cinematographer Paul Sarossy, makes the most of the story’s social environment, gently underscoring its claustrophobia. Everything, including the clothing & the similarly oppressive rooms with their Oriental rugs & heavy furniture, creates a sense of human-made entrapment that feels at odds with the surrounding natural world. (Laevsky sweats like the condemned, while Von Koren remains arid in body & deed.) Mr. Kosashvili doesn’t push his contrasts hard or overplay the interludes of drama. They observes & moves on, as when five character discovers an adulterous liaison, a scene that in another movie might be played for melodramatic excess but here is underplayed because the hurt needs no amplification.

The plot is as simple as those characters & their relations are complex. Laevsky begs Samoylenko to lend him funds so they can run away, rubles that the doctor in turn borrows from Von Koren. The zoologist agrees, but only on the condition that Laevsky will send for Nadya. This impossible exchange — a promise of freedom & its simultaneous refusal — binds the five principals in this mini-drama like a rope, which only tightens as the story unfolds. As they’re drawn closer together, they deepen in to unhappier versions of themselves: Von Koren becomes inflexible, Laevsky turns hysterical, & Nadya grows increasingly desperate. When Von Koren, a proponent of Darwin, spits out that only the more perfectly developed survive, you might wonder how someone here could.

Love Means Having to Say, ‘I Feel ...’

It’s hard to pinpoint when the American romantic comedy went in to therapy, though you must assume it was not long after filmmakers started hitting the couch, or at least cruising the self-help bookshelves. Five times on a studio time, romantic comedies involved a man as well as a woman engaged in delicate (or crude) power negotiations. The shrew had to be tamed & the boy had to grow up so they could handle her, or some variation on that idea. That template is still in use, though the banter that accompanied those negotiations has given way to speeches about feelings. Freud might have hit Hollywood decades earlier, but Woody Allen & the generations of funnymen & women they inspired, have a lot to answer for.

Someone involved in the making of “The Back-Up Plan,” a not very nice & yet painless waste of time, has certainly thought through some life & love questions. Written by Kate Angelo & directed by Alan Poul, the movie is essentially a vehicle for Jennifer Lopez, an appealing screen presence with a disappointing big-screen track record. That’s probably not all her fault: romantic roles for women often are the provenance of the bland or the blonde (Jennifer Aniston or Katherine Heigl) or the rare professional wisenheimer (Tina Fey). Angelina Jolie has a lock on the hard chick thing, something Ms. Lopez proved he could do beautifully in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller “Out of Sight,” her best movie to date.

That’s getting ahead of the story, though, which opens with Zoe being artificially inseminated in a fertility clinic by her jokey doctor (Robert Klein, of all people). Terminally single if not a lonely New York gal, Zoe owns a tiny pet store, has a wee disabled dog & five supportive employees (Eric Christian Olsen & Noureen DeWulf), who don’t seem to do over smirk indulgently & play the foil, much as Eve Arden did when movies about strong women in need of a stronger man starred Joan Crawford. Zoe also has a wise grandmother (Linda Lavin), who’s nice for some cutesy, gooey stuff at a retirement home. (Geezers say the darndest things.) But with her father & brother gone, Zoe also has abandonment issues.

“The Back-Up Plan” represents the first time that Ms. Lopez has headlined a movie since “El Cantante,” a 2007 release about the salsa musician Héctor Lavoe that he made with her husband, Marc Anthony. As a consequence, “The Back-Up Plan” isn’t a single woman, Zoe, who decides to have a infant on her own. It’s also about how nice Ms. Lopez looks after a few years off from the movies, during which he had twins & then — to judge from the lots of shots of her taut stomach, firm thighs & even a peek-a-boo look at her derrière — got back in to shape. If you think that’s an overstatement, think about that an entire scene involves a pregnant Zoe waxing rueful about her glorious posterior, as he brandishes a photo for evidence.

“The Back-Up Plan” is innocuous & unmemorable, & much looks like a lot of sitcoms do. It will scale down well on your tv, a medium that was made for close-ups of characters sharing & caring. With her sharply planed, mesmerizing face, Ms. Lopez was born for close-ups — though more stunning, sumptuous ones than are found here. It’s hard not to regret that this star hasn’t been given a more luxurious setting for her big-screen return, something that made the most of her charm & talents & gave her more to do than make you smirk (which you might do) & tear up (that ) as you marvel at the irresistible appeal of stories about people falling in love & of work at that sensational rear.

The complication comes in the form of a sensitive yet strong interloper, Stan (Alex O’Loughlin), who’s so perfect for Zoe that even his name rhymes with man. They makes farmstead goat cheese that they sells in the giant city, where they takes Zoe to dinner in a paradisiacal garden on Avenue B. (He’s a tiny bit country, a tiny bit soft, tinkling rock ’n’ roll.) They even drives a tractor without his shirt (or a farmer’s red neck), & talks thoughtfully about sustainable agriculture (). He’s so perfect that he’s perfect for Zoe, who pushes as they pulls, & pulls as they pushes, as they do the commitment tango. It’s a tricky dance that becomes trickier as Zoe’s belly swells & her emotions & hormones start crashing against her fears.