The Lovers – 7.5

Seen amid a slew of Broadway productions, it was refreshing to enter a world of real people, real situations and real emotions. Not that the affairs seemed terribly real – it was hard to see what the respective individuals saw in each other – but the characters portrayed by Debra Winger and Tracy Letts were so well acted, and dressed so frumpily, that you scarcely thought of them as movie stars. There were no big stakes here, just people coping with their everyday lives, and you didn’t even particularly care how things worked out, or didn’t. The trick ending produced a smile and a deep thought or two as you left the theater, but it was probably the least real moment of the film.