VIDEOS
Grosse Point Blank (15). Stubbornly ironic yet generally likeable comedy, co-written and produced by star John Cusack. Playing a hitman who returns to his hometown for a high-school reunion, Cusack displays perfect deadpan wit - a little too perfect, perhaps. The film's studied eccentricity shows, and there are a few too many attempts to get laughs the Tarantino way. Still, it's rescued time and again by George Armitage's energetic direction, a winning Eighties soundtrack, and most of all, a first-rate cast that includes Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd, and the priceless Joan Cusack.
Addicted to Love (15). The first film by actor Griffin Dunne (best known for his performance in Martin Scorsese's After Hours) is a romantic comedy with a mean streak and a soft centre. Its bid to subvert the genre consists largely of casting Meg Ryan, Hollywood's queen of mush, as a vengeful, relationship- destroying bitch. All hell breaks loose when Ryan's smarmy French boyfriend (Tcheky Karyo) leaves her for a willowy blonde (Kelly Preston), who has, in turn, abandoned her fiance (befuddled astronomer Matthew Broderick). The freshly dumped pair form an alliance to win back their respective exes, only to find that they were, conveniently enough, meant for each other all along. Karyo makes a vaguely insulting caricature more amusing than it should be, but everyone else is on autopilot, even Ryan, who, try as she might, doesn't quite cut it as a crazed stalker; a motorcycle helmet and excessively applied eyeliner don't do nearly enough to disguise her congenital wholesomeness.
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