home again movie review

Usually there is nothing wrong with indulgent escapism as a cinematic commodity. But it’s probably more than a little tone deaf right now to trot out to see a cream-puffy Hollywood rom-com fantasy involving coddled well-off people. Consider that one of the bigger setbacks faced by at least three characters at some point in “Home Again” is that they choose to eat cold leftover lasagna straight out of the same red Le Creuset pan. Oh, the humanity.

After observing thousands of Houstonians forced out of their own now-demolished homes by a devastating flood and their self-sacrificing rescuers, I found myself from the get-go having difficulty summoning much sympathy for Reese Witherspoon ’s Alice, a newly separated mother of two who we first meet as she sobs in her bathroom on her 40th birthday. Her New York City-based music-biz husband ( Michael Sheen ) apparently refused to give up on the hard-partying lifestyle that such a profession requires. So she and her sitcom-sassy grade-school daughters have moved back to Los Angeles, where her ex-actress mother ( Candice Bergen , the only cast member who is able to ring much zing from her semi-comedic lines) and a ready-made network of giddy gal pals applaud her return.

Not that Alice has problems finding a new home since she inherited a vintage spread from her late Oscar-winning director-father, a revered ‘70s icon, as well as a sporty classic car. (Sorry, I don’t have the gene that allows you to instantly know a make and model, but the sloping roof suggests a Porsche). The one-floor, hacienda-style abode is big enough to accommodate  not just a built-in pool and a courtyard spacious enough to hold group yoga classes for her friends. There is also a roomy cottage that enables three cash-strapped 20-something filmmaking brothers ( Nat Wolff , Jon Rudnitsky and Pico Alexander , a name that befits a cocktail) to camp out with her while waiting for their movie deal to go through. That Alice just met this trio on a drinking binge while celebrating her big 4-0 at a bar and almost slept with one of them (Alexander, who is adorable and knows it)—well, this act of charity seems to be the very least she can do. That makes for one big kooky makeshift family. Then her estranged husband has second thoughts and shows up unannounced at her door. Supposedly amusing testosterone-induced alpha-male antics follow.

The blizzard of white privilege that bedecks “Home Again” is practically blinding (I counted three ethnically diverse actors in small speaking roles). If this sounds  something like a junior-league variation on something like “It’s Complicated” with the addition of our heroine relying on her trio of house guests as unpaid child-care providers, a tech troubleshooter and a live-in boy toy, that’s because it is. Eau de Nancy Meyers , the queen of upper-class affairs of the heart amid decadent décor porn, is all over this. But she is actually on the sidelines as one of the producers. Instead, this is the brainchild of her 30-year-old novice writer-director daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer , and the organic apple certainly didn’t fall far from the artisanal tree.

To be fair, I confess to having a lovingly curated weak spot for much of Meyers’ oeuvre after she split from hubby Charles Shyer (who fared less well without her input): “ What Women Want ,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “The Holiday,” “ The Intern ”—primo wish-fulfillment chick flicks one and all, and each eminently re-watchable. But even if “Home Again” was released when there wasn’t a national crisis affecting a large portion of the country, it would still seem somewhat off. Meyers-Shyer has said that she wanted to reflect the fact that women seem to be getting divorced earlier in their lives these days combined with a gender twist on a May-December romance. Fair enough. But the hurdles that Alice faces aren’t all that relatable or even much of a problem once she summons the courage to verbally confront them. Her nice estranged husband wants her back. Her easy-access young sex partner has maturity issues. Her first client in her new career as a decorator is a stereotypical self-centered nightmare, a role that totally wastes Lake Bell ’s talents.

Speaking of which, after her awards-worthy work in “ Wild ” and on TV’s “ Big Little Lies ,” Witherspoon is taking at least two steps backward as Alice. She is just too smart of an actress to believably play a pushover who is prone to anxiety attacks and being taken advantage of by others. When her brief imitation of Bell’s snarling Labradoodle is her funniest scene, there is a problem here.

Apparently, the most unbelievable part of the film—that Alice would allow three strangers to move in with her and her young daughters—actually happened to a woman that Meyers-Shyer knew. Fine. But her job was to make it believable in her movie instead of just a plot contrivance. Yes, the casual-chic interior designs shine as much as her mom’s ever did. But I never really felt at home with “Home Again.”

Susan Wloszczyna

Susan Wloszczyna spent much of her nearly thirty years at USA TODAY as a senior entertainment reporter. Now unchained from the grind of daily journalism, she is ready to view the world of movies with fresh eyes.

• Pico Alexander as Harry
• Michael Sheen as Austen
• Nat Wolff as Teddy
• Candice Bergen as Lillian Stewart
• Lola Flanery as Isabel
• Reese Witherspoon as Alice Kinney
• Lake Bell as Zoey
• David Bilow

Cinematographer

• Dean Cundey
• Hallie Meyers-Shyer
• John Debney

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Home Again Review: Reese Witherspoon Heads into an Uncanny Valley

Many of us want to make our parents proud. But precious few of us get the opportunity to express that desire as fully and garishly as Hallie Meyers-Shyer does in her new film, Home Again. Her mother is writer-director Nancy Meyers, the legendary purveyor of wealthy white neurosis whose films— It’s Complicated, Something’s Gotta Give —communicate their sophistication through impeccable home decor and glassware. (Her father is Charles Shyer, Nancy’s collaborator on Baby Boom and Father of the Bride, among others.)

A Nancy Meyers movie is instantly recognizable. They are signature and without compare—which is what makes Home Again so fascinating and strange. The film throws you deep into the uncanny valley, presenting a synthetic version that’s so close to the real thing—which is to say, a genuine Nancy Meyers movie—that its small differences drive you mad. Home Again is an homage so slavish it becomes grotesque. I loved it. But I also found it kind of unnerving.

Reese Witherspoon plays Alice, a recently separated mother of two who is starting a new life on the West Coast—and who is, we’re told, a down-on-her-luck mess. And yet she lives in the fabulous old Spanish mansion once owned by her famous film director father, and has furnished it in the earthy, expensive Crate & Barrel regalia that is Nancy Meyers’s house style. Alice has two devoted daughters. She is only considering starting a side job as an interior designer, so money seems to not be a problem. Things are actually pretty good, and the movie is mostly smooth and frictionless throughout.

There are some mild entanglements, of course. While out partying for her birthday, Alice meets a handsome, young aspiring director, Harry ( Pico Alexander ), and his two less cute, but still cute, friends. (One is a writer, the other an actor. The three are trying to turn a short that was well received at SXSW into a feature.) Drunk and feeling reckless, Alice brings the boys home and has a scuttled attempt at sex with Harry. The next morning, Alice’s mother, played by a well-coiffed Candice Bergen, offers the boys the guest house after hearing that they’ve been kicked out of their apartment. (Of course there’s a guest house.) Alice initially balks at the idea, but soon grows to love having these helpful, energetic young men around.

Meyers-Shyer is but 30 years old, and yet she’s written three late-millennial boys—the other two are played by Nat Wolff and Jon Rudnitsky —as a grandmother might imagine her grandson to be: polite, earnest, a little goofy and rambunctious, but never bad. It’s a lovely little fantasy, until it gets weird. As the boys get to know Alice, they gain a deep appreciation for her way of life—how she elegantly, but comfortably, styles her home, how she always has heaping feasts of gorgeous-looking, but homey, food at the ready. Their affection is both filial and sexual, a complicated psychology that this strenuously bright and airy movie refuses to grapple with. So it just hangs there, this “I kinda want to kiss dream mommy” energy unsettling the easygoing vibes.

Of course, Harry is doing more than kissing mommy. Alexander makes for a dashing swain, confident with just a hint of cheesiness. The movie sets up some excuses for why the difference in their ages means Harry and Alice can’t be together, but they’re not convincing. The film is frustratingly insistent that this is a crazy idea, a wacky little fling that’s meant to make both parties realize things about their lives and then go their separate ways. Which is a shame, this shooing away of a potentially transgressive, lasting relationship. With that out of the picture, what remains is a simple plot and what appears to be an aggressive courting of Nancy Meyers’s favor. Well, I suppose that’s one way to look at the movie’s eerie familiarity. The other way is that Nancy Meyers, a producer on the film, maybe elbowed her way into the creative process and turned Home Again into one of her own movies.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I think this is a child trying very hard to emulate a parent. And Meyers-Shyer is prodigiously thorough about it, divesting herself of almost all the idiom of her generation. Instead of giving the three boys any markers of their particular age, she puts them in nice visit-to-grandma’s/graduation dinner clothes and has them learn the value of keeping fresh flowers in the house. Home Again has a discomfitingly obedient quality. It’s all pretty meta, the young people learning to appreciate a perfect woman in a movie meant to appease a perfect woman. You could study this thing in psych class for a year.

There’s another darkness at work in the film. Nancy Meyers’s hallowed materialism—her vision of a personal utopia in which pretty much everyone is white and rich and loves drinking virgin mimosas in exquisite kitchens while they kvetch about nothing—turns somewhat sour when it’s re-created in a knock-off. As a result, it’s a little gross how great everything looks in Home Again. Maybe it’s the dire times surrounding the movie that put it in such negative contrast, or maybe it’s that this veneration of haute boomer-bourgeoisie trappings goes from silly to insidious when it’s passed down generationally. Shouldn’t a child born of this rebel against it, rather than crafting a filmic paean to its god?

I realize I’m being a little dramatic, and maybe giving off the impression that I didn’t like the movie. Home Again —which takes its name from a song by every 30-year-old’s favorite singer, Carole King —is often quite charming. Witherspoon is appealing throughout, you want to pinch all the boys’ cheeks (face or otherwise), and, in a small role, Lake Bell does a riff on affluent Angeleno zen that’s the cleverest thing in the movie. I left with a smile on my face, which is appreciated these days.

Yet the more I thought about the movie, the more it all seemed kinda nuts. In placing her lead character somewhere between her and her mother’s age, Meyers-Shyer may have been trying to bridge some gap, to find a place of compromise between the old and the new. But there’s very little that belongs to the young in Home Again. The film instead seems like a sacrificial offering, dressed up in the old ways and carefully placed at the feet of an elder, in the hopes that it will please them. I sure hope it does.

Correction (4:22 P.M.): When first published, this article mistakenly referred to Charles Shyer as “the late.” We regret the error.

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Home Again, starring Reese Witherspoon, is the palate-cleansing charmer September needs

The frothy fantasy, produced by Nancy Meyers and directed by her daughter, is a throwback comedy about starting over.

by Alissa Wilkinson

“Charming” is the best word for Home Again , and how could it be otherwise? With Reese Witherspoon as the axis around which a uniformly genial cast revolves, it’s just the right palate-cleanser, a bit of cinematic melon sorbet on the tongue before the serious fall movie season begins.

Is it a great movie? No. Very little of the film sticks with you after the credits roll.

But Home Again does leave a bit of an afterglow — the combined product of its sunny Los Angeles setting, its gorgeous sets and stars, and its lighthearted take on love, passion, getting older, and choosing your family. It does just what it sets out to do: Give us a bit of fantasy, and then let us remember the joy of reality. And as summer gives way to the opening days of autumn, that’s plenty.

Home Again showcases the charm and talent of its star

Home Again ’s charm relies entirely on its star, Reese Witherspoon, whose turn as Alice Kinney, a 40-year-old woman recently separated from her music-biz husband Austen ( Michael Sheen ), is fun to watch even when the character herself feels a little underwritten.

It’s worth taking a moment to pause and consider Witherspoon’s career, especially since Home Again follows her stellar work in the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries Big Little Lies earlier this year. Her character in that show is of the same type as Home Again , in many ways: a mother of young children who’s approaching middle age; a person of means, wealthy enough to not really worry about money; and an intelligent woman moving into a new phase of life, confident in her body and her attractiveness to men.

That’s a pretty near perfect description of the actress herself, whom we’ve watched age into that role for decades. Witherspoon has been a memorable actress since her teenage debut in 1991’s The Man in the Moon , winning awards for her breakthrough performance in Pleasantville in 1998; the following year she starred as the indelible, terrifying Tracy Flick in Election , which ensured she’d never be shuffled off by Hollywood as a tame blonde starlet.

Witherspoon’s Southern accent and perky, bright-eyed demeanor always settle side by side with an intelligent edge and bite, whether she’s flattening her lame ex-boyfriend while conquering Harvard Law in Legally Blonde , matching Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash note for note in her Oscar-winning Walk the Line performance, or gathering her shattered sense of self while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild . (Becky Sharp, in Mira Nair’s 2004 Vanity Fair adaptation, was the ideal Witherspoon role.)

But even in her fluffier roles, in movies like Sweet Home Alabama , Witherspoon’s appeal is evident; you can’t mix her up with some other actress, because her line delivery and screen presence simply isn’t like anyone else’s. She’s the kind of actress for whom the term “movie star” was coined. And in the past several years, she’s parlayed that appeal and intelligence into her production company , a retail brand , and a women-focused media company .

As Alice in Home Again , Witherspoon brings all of her history with her, which is why the character feels well-rounded. Alice’s late father, John Kinney, was a famous movie director, a philandering husband, and a loving father who left his house to Alice when he died, complete with a guest house out back. Alice’s mother, Lillian ( Candice Bergen ), was a beautiful actress and much younger than John when they got together, and their relationship was passionate and tempestuous before it broke apart. Alice grew up with her mother, but idolized her father.

It’s never wise to impose biography onto fictional screenplays, but in the case of Home Again , it’s at least worth nothing that writer and director Hallie Meyers-Shyer is the daughter of the celebrated Nancy Meyers ( What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, The Intern ) and her slightly less famous ex-husband, Charles Shyer (who remade Father of the Bride and Alfie ). Meyers-Shyer’s grandfather on her father’s side was a founder of the Directors Guild of America, and she acted in a number of her parents’ movies before striking out on her own for Home Again , which her mother produced. So she has deep roots in the film business, and is undoubtedly familiar with the way people in the industry live.

Home Again is a fantasy that gives way to something more like reality

Home Again feels aware of Hollywood history, too — it’s like watching an older style of comedy, but set in 2017, with all the attending mores and social norms. The story hinges on a surprising and comical makeshift family that Alice forms with three twentysomething aspiring filmmakers. Harry ( Pico Alexander ) is the director, and the suave one; George ( Jon Rudnitsky ) is the sweet screenwriter; and Teddy ( Nat Wolff ) is the barely sketched out actor. The trio had a hit with a short film at the SXSW Film Festival and struck out for Los Angeles, sure that they’d be able to get work immediately. The reality, of course, hasn’t been quite as favorable.

While they’re getting the runaround from the producer they met at SXSW, they get booted out of the motel room they’re sharing because — in a scene echoing a thousand other movies — they can’t pay the week’s rent, and the manager has had enough. That scene is the first in which we meet the young men, and it’s a clear indicator that they’re meant to be in the mold of older movie stars. That’s particularly true for Alexander’s Harry, who is definitely trying to channel Cary Grant.

He’s only half successful, but that’s sort of the joke. When Alice, having recently returned to LA with her daughters after her separation from Austen, meets him in a bar, he hits on her in the kind of gentlemanly way you can only learn from watching old movies with fedora-wearing male leads. She’s flattered, especially given he’s at least a dozen years younger than her, and brings him and the other guys back to her table to hang out with her friends.

What happens next wouldn’t be in an old movie: A tequila shot-soaked night that ends with everyone crashing at Alice’s house, and Harry in Alice’s bed. She’s properly embarrassed when her mother Lillian shows up with her daughters the next morning before school.

But Lillian takes a shine to the guys, and by the time Alice returns home from her day, Lillian’s suggested they take up temporary residence in the guest house. Why not? Alice has the space, and maybe having some people around will cheer Alice and the girls up after their cross-country move.

It works: Not only does Alice get company out of the deal, but also a ready-made set of babysitters/drivers/fix-it guys/friends. They, as aspiring filmmakers, are pretty jazzed to discover they’re living in the great John Kinney’s guest house. Plus, while all three young men are unfailingly kind and adore Alice, Harry is the one to whom she finally succumbs, though she’s not so sure he’s really boyfriend material.

Okay, so this is a total fantasy — and like all fantasies, it can’t really last. The course of true love (or at least a really satisfying affair) can’t run smooth for long, nor can the guys’ fantasy of making it in Hollywood as a team. Like all fantasies, it has its failings, too: John Kinney gets let off the hook for his bad behavior a little too easily; the idea of Alice’s marriage evolving instead of dissolving is never really taken seriously; and the whole thing wraps up a tad more neatly than seems plausible.

But fantasies have their place, as long as they don’t overtake us entirely. And Home Again knows this. As the story unfolds, it grows out of the need to self-consciously ape a fantasy of old Hollywood, instead becoming something a little more sober and contemporary — and that, most likely, is exactly the point. Idolizing our golden ages (whether it’s a lost era of moviemaking or a romanticized memory of our own youth) is never productive, and it doesn’t help anyone move forward. Home Again posits that while home is never really exactly what you remember, making a new home can be a good thing, too.

Home Again opens in theaters on September 8.

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Film Review: Reese Witherspoon in ‘Home Again’

Reese Witherspoon plays L.A.'s perkiest single mom in a comedy from Hallie Meyers-Shyer, who wears her Hollywood pedigree a little too obviously.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ Home Again ,” a lifestyle comedy with a soupçon of pain, stars Reese Witherspoon as a perky Los Angeles mother of two coping with a perky divorce and perky career problems (let’s pause and take a breath before we get to her perky love life). It’s the first feature written and directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer, whose last name alone sounds like the opening credits of two dozen comedies: Her mother is Nancy Meyers , director of “The Parent Trap,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “It’s Complicated” and “The Intern,” and her father is Charles Shyer , director of “Baby Boom,” “Father of the Bride” and “Father of the Bride II.” (The couple, who divorced in 1999, collaborated as writers and/or producers on a number of other features, including “Private Benjamin.”)

Depending on your point of view, that pedigree will mean one of two things: Hallie Meyers-Shyer was put on earth to make contemporary Hollywood screwball comedies — or she was put on earth to make glib, pat, overly cozy and superficial contemporary Hollywood screwball comedies. “Home Again” nudges you toward the latter scenario, but who knows? I had limited patience for the original Meyers-Shyer team (though “Baby Boom” remains one of life’s so-cheesy-it’s-irresistible guilty pleasures), yet once Nancy Meyers went out on her own, she became a wittier and more nimble filmmaker. So maybe Hallie Meyers-Shyer will follow in her footsteps and improve. Right now, she’s got nowhere to go but up.

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Here’s a way that she needs to improve. It’s OK, in rough economic times, to make a movie about upper-middle-class people who are cushioned from the anxieties that afflict so many of us, but it seems more than a trifle obnoxious to tell a story that unfolds in a bubble of Hollywood privilege and to present it as if it were something that everyone could relate to.

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Alice Kinney (Witherspoon), who’d been raising her family in New York, has just separated from her husband, played by Michael Sheen as the world’s nicest cutthroat music-industry executive (the two get along like besties). To cushion the blow, she has moved back to the sprawling L.A. bungalow where she grew up with her famous, charming and philandering filmmaker dad, John Kinney (David Netto), who is now deceased (we see him in adoring flashback), and her mother, Lilian (Candice Bergen), who has taken her in.

Alice seems pretty upbeat for someone who’s in the middle of a marital meltdown, facing the prospect of raising two kids mostly by herself, and it doesn’t take long to see why. Despite her situation, she has no economic worries! She comes from Hollywood royalty, and she has returned to the moneyed bosom of her childhood home, where she attempts to launch a career as a freelance interior decorator. (This part of the film plays like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” without irony.) Then she meets a dude — but even here, it’s really all about her dad.

Harry (Pico Alexander), who’s 27 but looks 23, is an aspiring director who has come to L.A. with his two buddy collaborators: George (Jon Rudnitsky), a screenwriter; and Teddy (Nat Wolff), an aspiring movie star. The three made a short that wowed the indie world (from the clips of it, it almost looks like Meyers-Shyer based it on “Queens Boulevard,” the Sundance film that was Vincent Chase’s stab at indie integrity on “Entourage”), and now they plan to expand it into a feature. They meet slimy agents who love them, a note-giving corrupt horror producer who loves them, and other cardboard Tinseltown deplorables. But at a bar, Harry meets Alice, and the sparks fly. The best way to describe their relationship might be as mildly inappropriate but cuddly.

They start dating — sort of. But more than that, Alice agrees to let Harry and his partners move into her guest house, because … why not? After all, it’s not as if her kids, her divorce, and her new career are keeping her busy. When George, the screenwriter, stumbles into her dad’s old study, jammed with movie posters and film reels, he acts as if he’d just learned that her father was Orson Welles. (Really? Making commercial American comedies in the late 1970s?) And when Harry tells Alice’s mother that he himself is a filmmaker, and Bergen puts a dry spin on the line “Everybody is! We’re in L.A.,” Harry shoots her a look that says, Yes, but our film is in black-and-white!  The three dudes are portrayed as millennial saints who become Alice’s pals, neighbors, chauffeurs, and babysitters, as the movie seeks to turn itself into a sitcom called “Four’s Company.”

“Home Again” really does have the look and feel of an early-period Meyers-Shyer product: the overly bright lighting and soft zingers, the feel-good conceits that get piled on top of each other. But it’s also a little tone-deaf. (At one point, Michael Sheen’s character is described as “Clark Gable meets Sean Penn.”) There’s a fist fight, a reckoning, and a Moral Quandary: Is George betraying his partners by going off to write a screenplay on his own? (Uh, no.) What there isn’t much evidence of is genuine experience: of life, or of filmmaking. Hallie Meyers-Shyer is trying to be a chip off two old blocks, but next time she’d be better off working less close to home.

Reviewed at Dolby 88, New York, Aug. 17, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 97 MIN.

• Production: An Open Road release of a Black Bicycle Entertainment, Waverly Films production. Producers: Nancy Meyers, Erika Olde. Executive producer: Jeremiah Samuels.
• Crew: Director, writer: Hallie Meyers-Shyer. Camera (color, widescreen): Dean Cundey. Editor: David Bilow. Music: John Debney.
• With: Reese Witherspoon, Pico Alexander, Nat Wolff, Jon Rudnitsky, Michael Sheen, Candice Bergen, Lake Bell, Eden Grace Redfield, Reid Scott, P.J. Byrne, Lola Flanery, Dolly Wells, David Netto.

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Home Again Reviews

...a decent-enough premise that’s employed to watchable yet pervasively forgettable effect...

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 8, 2022

A film that's not romantic enough for you to care, and not funny enough to make you laugh, "Home Again" barely qualifies as a rom-com. This is a movie that, while inoffensive, isn't worth your time.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | May 19, 2022

It's the wistful Reese rom-com that you expect from it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 5, 2020

[It] may have its heart in the right place as a bit of light, escapist entertainment, but it stops just short of artificially pausing conversation to let canned laughter dictate the audience's reaction.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 28, 2020

If you're just hankering to see Witherspoon on the big screen again, you could do worse. But we know she's capable and worthy of so much more.

Full Review | May 13, 2020

The most I can say is that it made me want to take a vacation to Santa Barbara.

I didn't really need to see this movie.

It has a good cast trapped in a script that is not challenging enough.

Full Review | Sep 20, 2019

Is there anything less relatable than rich, successful white people whining about how hard they have it?

Full Review | Original Score: .5/5 | Mar 21, 2019

Unfortunately Home Again wasn't a romantic comedy... It was a sitcom about 3 guys trying to get a screenplay made in LA and an older woman helping them out.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Mar 7, 2019

What a pleasure to see a film that's lighthearted and free from the raunch that dominates most chick flicks nowadays.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 20, 2018

Usually considered somewhat of a spark plug in her plucky-type of roles , Witherspoon is curiously reduced to playing what amounts to a walking sleeping pill in Meyers-Shyer's mawkish, contrived comedy Home Again.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Dec 19, 2018

Something's clearly missing, though it's never quite clear if the extra oomph Home Again needed was left on the cutting room floor or out of the script entirely.

Full Review | Dec 19, 2018

"Home Again" feels like comfort food, specifically low fat vanilla bean ice cream from Whole Foods. Yes, the film is that white, frothy and delightful.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 2, 2018

Are you sure this isn't a television pilot for CBS?

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 30, 2018

I can already tell that it's going to be one of those movies that I watch over and over again once it's available on TV.

Full Review | Aug 26, 2018

On the whole, though, Alice is such a wet character, and her plight so shallow and insignificant, it is a struggle to care. Stay, go, cry, laugh, wake me when it is over.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 23, 2018

I think it's an excellent debut effort... a film doesn't have to make a grand social/political statement or make you squeamish to be enjoyable. Go Reese! Go Candice! Go Hallie!

Full Review | Aug 21, 2018

Reese is always appealing, but this film is clueless, sexist and at mostly just down right offensive. Sorry Reese, nothing to like here.

Full Review | Jun 22, 2018

The film is cute and funny and light, with really nice messages about love and dreams and family, giving it a classic romantic comedy feel that is the definition of a comfort watch.

Full Review | Jun 6, 2018

Home Again (2017)

• User Reviews
• Flat, one-dimensional characters
• A brainfart of a story
• A typical unrealistic Hollywood fantasy without any comedy
• What's up with all the sitting around the table and laughing scenes?
• A fat Martin Sheen in a stupid role (this one doesn't really count but it bothered me)
• How in EARTHS name does Reese pay for things? It's daddy's house, OK. But how does she pay for all her sh*t? Going out to dinner with friends, having a macbook, raising two kids and driving a bl**dy Volvo XC90 T6? Without a (steady) job?? Only in Hollywood fantasyland!

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Common Sense Media Review

Some sexual situations and drinking in shallow romcom.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Home Again is a comedy/romance starring Reese Witherspoon as a newly separated LA mom whose life changes drastically when she invites three younger guys to come stay in her guesthouse. The movie has several scenes of drinking and partying, including an adult couple's drunken…

Why Age 13+?

Rare use of words including "s--t," "hell," "crap,&quot

Several instances of adult drinking, including an extensive night-on-the-town se

No nudity, but several scenes of a couple in bed -- one in which they try but fa

Brawl between two people who don't know how to fight.

Brands such as Zoloft are mentioned, but products aren't overtly promoted or

Any Positive Content?

Messages aren't especially clear, but you could argue for takeaways related

Most characters are so wrapped up in their own wants that they fail to see issue

Rare use of words including "s--t," "hell," "crap," "bitch" and "goddamn." "Oh my God" and "Jesus" used as exclamations.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Several instances of adult drinking, including an extensive night-on-the-town sequence that ends in a drunken attempt at sex. A bag of marijuana is discovered but not used on-screen. A child prepares a margarita. The main character gets drunk on a date and tells off an enemy in a restaurant.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

No nudity, but several scenes of a couple in bed -- one in which they try but fail to have sex (played for comic effect), one in which they succeed, and several snippets as part of a montage. Nonspecific discussion of sex.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Brands such as Zoloft are mentioned, but products aren't overtly promoted or placed.

Positive Messages

Messages aren't especially clear, but you could argue for takeaways related to the value of the family we choose rather than the one we're born into. The movie also embraces unconventional but loving relationships.

Positive Role Models

Most characters are so wrapped up in their own wants that they fail to see issues from others' perspective. While they eventually come around, it's not particularly convincing or natural. At least the adults all care about the kids. Despite the fact that it's set in Los Angeles, the movie's characters and cast aren't notably diverse.

Parents need to know that Home Again is a comedy/romance starring Reese Witherspoon as a newly separated LA mom whose life changes drastically when she invites three younger guys to come stay in her guesthouse. The movie has several scenes of drinking and partying, including an adult couple's drunken attempt at sex. There are more sexual situations between the couple, too, but no nudity. Language isn't frequent but includes "s--t," "bitch," and "goddamn"; in one scene, a bag of marijuana is discovered (but it's not used on-screen). Given the movie's premise, it's no surprise that the topic of separation and divorce is central. Witherspoon's character's kids catch her emerging from her room one morning with one of the younger guys. Parents will want to gauge how ready kids are to talk about moving on from a failed marriage into a new concept of family. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (4)
• Kids say (7)

Based on 4 parent reviews

Love this movie

What's the story.

In HOME AGAIN, newly separated 40-year-old mother of two Alice ( Reese Witherspoon ) moves back into the house where she grew up. It was the home of her late father, a storied Hollywood director. She soon meets 20-something aspiring filmmakers Harry (Pico Alexander), Teddy ( Nat Wolff ), and George (Jon Rudnitsky), and, for no good reason, lets them move into her guesthouse. Two fall for her, and all three fall for her family (which includes Candice Bergen as her mom), but the conveniently loaded apple cart is upset by the arrival of Alice's estranged husband, Austen ( Michael Sheen ), a music executive who wants his family back.

Is It Any Good?

This is one of those brightly lit Hollywood romcoms with commercial-style acting and precious little insight into human behavior. It's built on thin contrivances and thinner characters. Does it seem wise for a newly separated mom of two young kids to allow three total strangers to move in to her guesthouse? They're not paying rent; Alice only knows them from one night of drunken partying and near-sex (she even admits when she agrees to the arrangement that she doesn't know two of their names). No background checks, nothing. And she doesn't tell her recently estranged but still very involved husband about the situation. Really, it sounds more like a setup for a horror movie than a romcom. Plus, logical issues aside, Home Again is a textbook case of "telling, not showing." We're told the characters are great writers, actors, designers, whatever -- but we're never shown these qualities. We're told Austen is "the actual king of manipulation," but we see none of that. He seems like an OK guy who really loves his kids. Alice, no stranger to the film industry since her dad was a director and her mother an actress, starts a relationship with one of the young filmmakers, but when he can't come to a dinner party because he's stuck in a meeting (and texts to tell her so), that's apparently a hanging offense.

The film is so unmoored from reality that even though it's set in diverse, modern-day Los Angeles, it's actually a surprise when a nonwhite face shows up on the screen. Home Again -- which marks the directing debut of romcom queen Nancy Meyers ' daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer -- gets a laugh here and there from an 11-year-old quoting a Zoloft ad, but never from viewers' understanding of the characters or their interactions. The acting is done a disservice by the script and direction's lack of depth. Supposedly charming "boy" Harry (Alexander) essentially plays the same smirk through the whole film instead of finding levels and tactics in his scenes -- that's on Meyers-Shyer. The acting sort of finds its footing when Witherspoon is caught in a tug-of-war between Austen and her guests and when there's a brief confrontation between Austen and Teddy, but even that suddenly devolves into a fistfight played for (meager) laughs. Home Again 's apparent theme of choosing your family, rather than just being born into it, sits unmoving on its shallow, undistinguished surface.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Home Again portrays drinking . Are there realistic consequences? Why is that important?

There's a storytelling concept called "show, don't tell." Do you know what that means? What are we told about Harry and Austen's behavior? How do we see them actually behave? Which has more impact? Why is it important to show, not tell?

The movie is set in Los Angeles, but only one clearly nonwhite actor has any lines. Does that fit your impression of the makeup of that city?

How serious a fault is it when Harry fails to show up to the dinner party with Alice? Did he behave unreasonably? Was that bad enough to end their relationship?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 8, 2017
• On DVD or streaming : December 12, 2017
• Cast : Reese Witherspoon , Lake Bell , Michael Sheen , Nat Wolff
• Director : Hallie Meyers-Shyer
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Open Road Films
• Genre : Comedy
• Run time : 97 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : some thematic and sexual material
• Last updated : April 29, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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• DVD & Streaming

Content Caution

In Theaters

• September 8, 2017
• Reese Witherspoon as Alice Kinney; Michael Sheen as Austen; Candice Bergen as Lillian Stewart; Jon Rudnitsky as George; Pico Alexander as Harry; Nat Wolff as Teddy; Lake Bell as Zoey; Lola Flanery as Isabel

Home Release Date

• December 12, 2017
• Hallie Meyers-Shyer

Distributor

• Open Road Films

Movie Review

Life can feel so much like a movie, ya know? So mush like one a’ my director father’s old movies. It’s craazy!

I mean, looka me! Yes, I knows I’m 40. And this guy, Harry, and his friends are prolly no more than in their late twenties. But, hey, he started flirting with me, affer all. And, c’mon, what 40-year-old, recently separated woman wouldn’t appreciate jus’ a little attention from a handsome twentysomething guy, right?

What 40-year-old woman, with two kids, who’s feeling un’erappreciated an’ who’s had prolly a wee bit too much to drink at her foortieth birthday party wouldn’t leap at the chance ta be in my shoes right now … ? Tha’s what I’d like ta know.

Woohoo! Les’ party!

Of course, by the time Alice pulls herself up the next morning to find a naked guy in her bed and his friends all passed out on her couch next to one of her equally unconscious girlfriends, her head has cleared a bit. And she realizes that drinking that much was probably a bad thing.

Thank goodness her daughters, Isabel and Rosie, aren’t here to see this.

But then, wouldn’t you know it? There they are walking in the front door just in time to see Harry walk out of her bedroom.

The girls gasp.

“Oops,” Alice’s mother says. “Sorry.”

Yep, drinking that much was probably a bad thing.

It’s at this point that 40-year-old Alice Kinney wonders what happened in her life. What happened to her marriage? Why did she move the girls out here to California? Why isn’t her music producer husband helping out more?

And why is her mother chatting up these young guys (who happen to be struggling filmmakers) and offering them the opportunity to stay in the empty guest house! Ugh!

If this were a movie, Alice thinks to herself, this would be the spot where the chipper underscore would start to rise while the mid-life crisis and romcom shenanigans begin.

(Cue: chipper underscore.)

Positive Elements

Alice makes several reckless choices that some of her friends see as “empowering.” But gradually, she realizes she needs to make decisions with her daughters in mind.

Fortunately, the three guys, Harry, Teddy and George, are nice enough that they help in that transition. They befriend young Isabel and Rosie, making sacrificial choices on the girls’ behalf and earnestly becoming father figures (as unexpected as that might seem) to them. In fact, George even goes so far as to warn Alice about Harry’s womanizing ways to protect her and the girls. “The thing you gotta realize about Harry is, he doesn’t do the right thing often enough.” Eventually, even the girls’ manipulative father, Austen, moves out to California and becomes a regular part of their lives.

Alice’s own dad, meanwhile, was an inconsistent one, to be sure. But it’s clear in flashbacks that he loved his daughter and would regularly encourage her. “Get ready, Alice,” he whispers to her while hugging the young girl. “The future is yours.”

Spiritual Elements

Alice says Isabel has begun meditating to help deal with her stress levels.

Sexual & romantic Content

Alice describes her father’s many marriages and infidelities. Indeed, we see him lounging with a number of bikini-clad women (one of whom is her mother). Though, she speaks of his randy proclivities with disdain, that doesn’t stop her from repeatedly hitting the sheets with Harry herself (though always offscreen). We see the two make out a few times, and Harry grab her clothed breast once.

Harry goes without his shirt on at least four or five occasions. Another time, he’s naked in bed but wrapped strategically in a sheet. Harry and Teddy both strip to their underwear and jump into the ocean for a swim. Harry is something of a player and easily slips into his seductive mode with a couple of different women.

Violent Content

The twentysomething guys all become a bit angry with Austen when he seems to be manipulating both Alice and his daughters. At one point Teddy, punches him in the nose. The two men begin scuffling, and both end up with bloody abrasions on their faces.

Crude or Profane Language

A half-dozen s-words join a use or two each of “b–ch” and “h—.” God’s and Jesus’ names are both misused a total of 14 times (with the former being combined with “d–n” once).

Drug and Alcohol Content

On the first day of school, 11-year-old Isabel feels stressed and pleads with her mom to put her on antidepressants like every other kid in America. Isabel tells her mom, “I’m feeling exhausted. Hopeless. And I don’t enjoy the things I once loved.” Alice asks, “Where are you getting this from?” Little sister Rosie chimes in from the back seat, “The Zoloft commercial, obviously!”

Alice doesn’t put her kids on antidepressants, but we see how she is self-medicating herself. She takes some kind of prescription antianxiety pill and drinks beer, wine and hard alcohol every day. (Isabel even mixes a margarita for her mom.) We also see Alice inebriated on two or three occasions, which—as already noted—leads to her making foolish choices.

In fact, every adult in this movie drinks regularly, be it wine with dinner or other forms of social drinking. And after moving into the guest house, Teddy accidentally drops a bag of marijuana in front of Alice. He apologizes and promises to flush it

Other noteworthy Elements

Harry, who’s drunk, vomits offscreen. A self-absorbed woman lies and abuses Alice’s trust, having her work without compensation.

A few years back, actress Reece Witherspoon did an interview with Plugged In in which she said she enjoyed acting in films that inspire and motivate thoughtful conversations.

Home Again, quite frankly, doesn’t reach that mark.

This lukewarm romcom does proffer a few nods to the importance of investing in your children. It casually affirms the need to grow up and take responsibility for your life and your relationships. And it even features a few characters an audience could almost care about. But then it stumbles.

Hampered by a laissez-faire, morally minimal worldview, Reese Witherspoon’s latest is a film that could have been better … but isn’t. As a would-be cinematic conversation starter, it never makes it past the opening icebreaker.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Home Again (2017)

November 7, 2017 by Robert Kojder

Home Again, 2017

Written and Directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer Starring Reese Witherspoon, Nat Wolff, Jon Rudnitsky, Pico Alexander, Lake Bell, Lola Flanery, Reid Scott, Eden Grace Redfield, Michael Sheen, and Candice Bergen

Life for a single mom in Los Angeles takes an unexpected turn when she allows three young guys to move in with her.

Home Again is dead on arrival as from the very beginning it is asking audiences to sympathize with the problems of privileged rich folk, specifically the struggles of Alice (Reese Witherspoon) trying to raise a pair of children after separating from her husband Austen (Michael Sheen) and heading back to Los Angeles where her deceased father was once an Oscar-winning filmmaker gifted with the ability of tapping into human emotion. The kicker is that neither the script nor direction from first-time writer/director Hallie Meyers-Shyer (daughter of notable romantic comedy filmmaker Nancy Meyers, who has made some legitimately great movies such as The Parent Trap )  is very successful at portraying authentic personalities and real people, instead offering a sanitized, annoyingly conventional, and fake observation of a midlife crisis.

Obviously, there is a reason why the setting is the luxurious high life of LA; Alice meets three aspiring filmmakers trying to find a distributor for a small time project they are working on getting off the ground. Also, because this is a romantic comedy (although it should be noted the movie doesn’t necessarily attempt much humor outside a wonderfully executed Captain Phillips dialogue reference and an immature fist fight), everyone meets in a bar where things quickly become steamy at home between Alice and Harry, easily the most flirtatious and advancing of the trio), thanks to the overwhelming amount of attractiveness bursting from the ensemble cast. Harry is the director of this tight-knit close group of movie making friends yet he looks like he should be up for leading roles in, well, projects similar to Home Again .

After some convincing from Alice’s mother (Candice Bergen), the three broke and down on their luck friends are granted access to temporarily live in the guest house until they find some footing in the crazy world of Hollywood. While meeting up with various agents and taking on separate side projects, the friends each become close to the family in their own way while usually also getting more intimate with Alice in the process. Basically, now we are supposed to care about a woman undergoing a midlife crisis that also has three handsome dudes helping out with her children, fixing up aspects of the humongous house, with Harry even giving her some action. Where is the conflict and why should I care about any of this?

Not to spoil too much (then again, it’s not exactly a mind blowing narrative), Austen gets word of three men shacking up in his wife’s house and decides to stop being a work obsessed record agent focused on finding the next Sam Smith to come home and manipulate his way back into a relationship. Will the filmmakers end up fighting each other over Alice? Will they fight Austen? Who will Alice choose to date? Truthfully, it’s hard to imagine anyone caring, but this is where it needs to be mentioned that Home Again falsely tries to subvert clichés and expectations. In the end, the movie is more about Alice starting her life over, but the romantic elements are still there, they’re just not in your face. Someone may have thought the way the film is wrapped up was clever and refreshing for a film of this genre, but it’s honestly just one awkward conclusion. Home Again exists so far from reality that 15 minutes into the movie, maybe less, people will mentally check out.

However, to be fair, nothing in the movie is offensively terrible. Sure, the performance from Pico Alexander as smitten hot rod Harry is unintentionally hilarious with his dialed-up to 11 charmingly monotone voice, and the musical score sounds like elevator tunes half of the time, but the film isn’t necessarily terrible. It plays everything too safe to be outright atrocious. The only real surprises in the movie are super random scenes where our sexy hopeful filmmakers decide to drop a seemingly important conversation to take off their shirts and go swim in a nearby beach. Fan service for the ladies I suppose (there are lots of shirtless men here). Anyway, I will give credit to the child actors for managing to be adorable and somehow able to deliver awkward dialogue pertaining to depression in a manner not really coming across as offensive.

Still, when it comes down to it, Home Again is a movie about a rich woman with rich people problems. The plight of the aspiring filmmakers occasionally does shine through as something to root for, but it’s all wrapped up in hallmark storytelling. A better film would have given a more involving dynamic regarding the rich and the poor, and characters that actually feel real and believable. It’s no fault of the actors (Reese Witherspoon is serviceable in the role of Alice); Home Again is simply dull.

Flickering Myth Rating  – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, friend me on Facebook, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Home Again is a bubbly brunch movie mimosa: EW review

Filmmaker Nancy Meyers is unmatched at delivering a certain kind of cinematic cream puff: dewy dramedies in which smart, pretty people fight (but never too meanly), fall in love (they can’t help it!), and always seem to have just come back from the farmers market (could those snap peas be any sweeter?).

Or she was unmatched, at least, until now. Home Again is actually the product of her 30-year-old daughter, first-time writer-director Hallie Meyers-­Shyer, though it might take a film-studies degree and a DNA swab to ferret out the difference. Reese Witherspoon’s Alice Kinney is a classic Meyers heroine in nearly every way. A plucky, adorably neurotic blonde freshly separated from her self-absorbed record-executive husband (Michael Sheen), she’s just moved from New York into the sprawling Los Angeles home of her late father, a playboy auteur whose onscreen muses once included Alice’s mother (Candice Bergen). While drowning her 40th-­birthday angst at a bar, she meets dreamboat Harry (Pico Alexander) and his friends (Nat Wolff and Jon Rudnitsky), three twentysomething musketeers with Hollywood aspirations of their own. It all ends in a group sleepover back at Alice’s (a chaste one, thanks to the last 17 tequilas). But by breakfast, she’s improbably agreed to let the recently homeless trio stay on in her guest cottage, just for a week or two. Within days they’ve formed a quasi-family with her two young daughters, and Alice is getting her groove back with Harry.

Enter the New York ex, a humiliating job tryout with a kimono’d socialite (Lake Bell), and a few more complications that will clearly be resolved by the fifth and final backyard dinner party. Witherspoon can easily carry an entire movie in her dimples, but it’s hard not to measure Alice against a role as richly written as her recent turn on Big Little Lies . Here, she’s mostly just a winsome proxy for midlife wish fulfillment — a bubbly brunch mimosa you drink up before the fizz is gone. B

Related Articles

“Home Again” Hits That Romcom Sweet Spot: BUST Review

HOME AGAIN Written and directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer Out September 8

To say there aren’t many new romantic comedies for or about women who remember the ’90s is an understatement; hell, there aren’t many movies for women period , much less those nearing middle age. And for those itching for a Nancy Meyers fix ( It’s Complicated , The Intern ), there’s good news — she produced Home Again , which was written and directed by her daughter Hallie Meyers-Shyer. Reese Witherspoon stars as Alice, a 40-year-old woman who’s just moved back to her late father’s sprawling L.A. pad after a split from her husband (Michael Sheen). A series of meet-cutes and coincidences later, Alice ends up lending her luxurious guesthouse to a trio of charming would-be filmmakers — Harry (Pico Alexander), George (Jon Rudnitsky), and Teddy (Nat Wolff) — who immediately take on domestic duties like cooking, helping out with Alice’s adorable children, and romancing Alice. And as if that wasn’t delightful enough, Candice Bergen plays Alice’s mom, a former muse for Alice’s troubled-but-brilliant filmmaker dad. The food is all perfectly plated, the real estate is gorgeous, and the simmering attractions are delightfully earnest. It’s all dreamy, though ultimately, not that memorable. The film is also incredibly white, which costs it at least one demerit. But in the end, Home Again hits that romcom sweet spot. 3/5 

BY JENNI MILLER

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PHOTO: KAREN BALLARD (HOME AGAIN)

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"HOME AGAIN WONT TAKE YOU HOME"

What You Need To Know:

(PaPaPa, RoRo, HH, B, LL, V, SS, N, AA, DD, MM) Very strong mixed pagan worldview with strong Romantic, humanist elements where there’s not even the slightest hint of a moral compass guiding any of the characters, the main character A separates from her husband because of his poor decisions and sleeps with another man multiple times although she is still married and only separated from her husband, all of the characters seem to have a “que sera sera” type of attitude, the main character allows her heart and feelings to guide the majority of her decisions, good or bad, she makes the decision to divorce her husband even though he comes to her asking to work it out, and everyone seems to be perfectly okay with divorce, plus some positive moral elements regarding the main character’s relationship with her two daughters; 14 obscenities and profanities (including several GDs), plus a man is heard vomiting in the bathroom after having too much to drink; light violence, the worst of which is two men get into a mild fist fight and wrestle on the ground outside with a bit of scrapes/blood on their faces, but nothing excessive or disturbing; a moderate amount of sexual content such as many mentions of the past multiple occurrences of adultery to many other women by the main character’s father (including the fact he got another woman pregnant while married to her mother), main character sleeps with one of three younger men staying at her house multiple times although she’s only separated and not divorced yet from her husband; brief upper male nudity in a hot tub and when two men strip down to their skivvies to swim in the ocean, plus a woman’s bare back is shown; alcohol use and drunkenness in several scenes (one man gets sick during a woman’s birthday celebration), including main character goes on a date with a man and gets drunk and lays out on a bench outside until someone picks her up; cigarette smoking includes images of actors in movies smoking cigarettes and some drug references such as one character unpacks his bag and a small plastic bag of marijuana falls out, a young daughter asks to be put on anti-depressants “just like all the other kids,” and main character pops a pill for anxiety; and, strong miscellaneous content includes depiction of a dysfunctional family, main character separates from her husband with her two children and moves them across the country, divorce is validated, main character only saw her father every other weekend as a child growing up, and many examples of moral relativism.

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HOME AGAIN stars Reese Witherspoon as Alice Kinney, the daughter of a famous classic Hollywood director known for his movies featuring Alice’s mother. The story opens as Alice is settling into her childhood home in Los Angeles with her two young daughters after they have left New York, including Alice’s husband, the father of their children. Alice has been separated from Austen for about five months. Alice isn’t romantically involved with anyone else. She’s just trying to get her feet on the ground back in her old home and maintain a relatively normal life for her daughters.

On her birthday, Alice goes out for dinner and drinks with some friends. She stumbles into three young filmmakers, new to Los Angeles and ready to pursue all the opportunities the entertainment capital of the world offers. Immediately attracted to one of the guys, Harry, Alice invites the three men back to her house. There, Harry gets sick after drinking too much and vomits, keeping her from doing something she might regret in the morning.

The next day, Alice’s mother brings the girls back home earlier than expected, and they all run into each other, catching everyone off guard. After one of the young filmmakers, George, accidentally stumbles upon all of her father’s old film paraphernalia, he realizes who Alice and her mom really are. Alice’s mother, fascinated by these young aspiring artists, invites them to stay for breakfast and then indefinitely. Alice reluctantly accepts to be the hostess of these newly homeless, starving artists. Thus begins a series of comical and romantic adventures and entanglements.

HOME AGAIN is written and directed by Hallie Myers-Shyer. She’s the daughter of Producer Nancy Meyers, who directed the very successful, MOVIEGUIDE® Award winning movies WHAT WOMEN WANT and the 1998 remake of THE PARENT TRAP, and Charles Shyer, the director of FATHER OF THE BRIDE, the 1991 remake of the Vincente Minnelli movie starring Spencer Tracy, and its 1995 sequel FATHER OF THE BRIDE II.

Sadly, however, HOME AGAIN isn’t as family-friendly as those four movies, including the more adult-oriented WHAT WOMEN WANT. Although it definitely has some heartwarming moments between the mother and her daughters and laughs throughout, HOME AGAIN portrays some dysfunctional family values. Much of the humor and situations are for a more mature audience. Worse, the movie’s godless worldview is strongly Romantic. Thus, the characters pursue their personal dreams and happiness apart from God and without any objective moral standards, much less any strong biblical standards. Consequently, HOME AGAIN contains a high amount of questionable content, including multiple examples of infidelity by multiple characters. Sometimes the movie portrays its adult situations as an internal struggle, but they’re also often passed off as something that just “happens” and not an actual decision that was made by a person capable of choosing to do the right thing.

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Movie Review: Home Again (2017)

• Frank Ochieng
• Movie Reviews
• No responses
• --> October 7, 2017

Surprisingly again, Reese Witherspoon (Lead Actress Oscar winner for “Walk the Line”) has settled for signing on the dotted line to partake in a woefully rudimentary romantic comedy. Usually considered somewhat of a spark plug in her plucky-type of roles (“Legally Blonde” being the most revered), Witherspoon is curiously reduced to playing what amounts to a walking sleeping pill in first time writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s mawkish, contrived comedy Home Again .

Witherspoon toils as Alice Kinney, a 40-year old single mother of two bright young daughters, whose life takes a turn when she separates from her New York City-based, music executive husband Austen (Michael Sheen, “ Brad’s Status ”). In doing so, she decides to leave the Big Apple with her children and return to her charming childhood home back in Los Angeles where she was pampered by her show business parents. Here Alice figures to get a fresh start, re-inventing herself as an interior decorator, but she has her finances to consider while establishing her freelancing career.

Clearly, the setup is to establish Alice as an affable soul who is open-minded and hopeful — the failed marriage and turning the big 40 are nothing more than obstacles for her to overcome. Which of course, she does as her fortunes change when she gives the green light for three aspiring filmmakers to stay under her roof at the guest house. These guys are special and pass the test because a.) they are in the “business” and that makes her movie-making parents extremely relevant again and b.) they are considered rather charismatic by Alice’s mother, Lillian (veteran Candice Bergen, “ Bride Wars ”) — an approval that is rather impressive. The trio of roommates consists of screenwriter George (Jon Rudnitsky, “Patchwork”), actor Teddy (Nat Wolff, “ Death Note ”) and director Harry (Pico Alexander, “ A Most Violent Year ”). In particular, the 27-year old Harry, despite the age difference, tickles Alice’s fancy as he reminds her so much of her late filmmaker father.

The ultimate problem with Home Again is that the farcical set-up is bland and the characterizations feel stiff and indifferent. Meyers-Shyer plays it safe and is reluctant to allow any radical staging of outlandish behavior to jump-start this formulaic romantic romp. As previously mentioned Witherspoon’s Alice appears restrained and boorish in staid material that should be inspired by a tumultuous life-changing shakeup. The May-December romancing between Alice and Harry has all the pop of an old “Love, American Style” rerun. Only Bergen’s star-maker “Mommy Dearest” Lillian and Witherspoon’s on-screen precocious offspring, Isabel (Lola Flanery, “The Mist” TV series) and Rosie (Eden Grace Redfield, “The Glass Castle”), breathe any passable energy into this witless vehicle.

Reese Witherspoon has shown us that she can, with indescribable ease and poise, portray a woman who is three-dimensional in perplexity — “ Wild ,” “ Water for Elephants ,” and the heralded HBO series “Big Little Lies” are proof of that. It is too bad that she could not transfer that fine-tuned feminine persona to Meyer-Shyer’s toothless narrative on transitional womanhood, bewildering motherhood, marital failure, cutesy (but comes off as creepy) age gap romancing, convenient affluence and winking at Hollywood’s synthetic importance. Silly-minded and relentlessly cloying, Home Again is not a home worth returning to.

Tagged: divorce , Hollywood , kids , Los Angeles , mother , roommates

Frank Ochieng has been an online movie reviewer for various movie outlets throughout the years before coming on board at CMC. Previously, Frank had been a film critic for The Boston Banner (now The Bay State Banner) urban newspaper and had appeared on Boston's WBZ NewsRadio 1030 AM for an 11-year run as a recurring media commentator/panelist on the "Movie/TV Night" overnight broadcasts. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Internet Film Critics Society (IFCS). Frank is a graduate of Suffolk University in the historic section of Boston's Beacon Hill.

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‘Home Again’ Finds Reese Witherspoon Trying To Resuscitate The Rom-Com

Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s Home Again is a fascinating banality, the movie equivalent of staring at a bucolic motel painting until you start to see skeletons in the haystacks. It’s a rom-com about an adrift 40-year-old named Alice (Reese Witherspoon) who introduces herself by introducing her dad, a fictitious ’70s auteur who made films you don’t have to see to have seen: personal sagas about heartbreak and death starring ingenues in bikinis, most of whom he shagged. Alice’s mom Lillian (a breezy Candice Bergen) was less than half his age when they got married, and not much older when they divorced — atypical only in that she got a ring and baby out of the deal.

Pops was away shooting in Mykonos when Alice was born, and he’s long-dead before Home Again begins. But his ghost hides in the shadows of Alice’s sun-dappled life. He’s there in the selfish record executive (Michael Sheen) she married and had two daughters with, one of whom (Lola Flanery) is begging to go on anti-depressants. His statuettes and scripts clutter the Brentwood mansion she flees to when she and her husband, Austen, separate. And most of all, he’s there in the way Alice acts like her own back-up singer, halfheartedly trying on vanity careers like a clothing designer and a photographer while waiting for another loud man to seize her mic. So while it might seem off-kilter when she takes home 27-year-old Harry (Pico Alexander), a cocky director who just moved to LA after his short won SXSW, her therapist, if she had one, would say her terrible mate selection is perfectly in-key. (And her best friend, played by Dolly Wells, can’t resist noting that all their male friends are also dating millennials.)

Harry is a tall, handsome nothing, a strutting mannequin whose defining quality is skin as smooth and dense as butterscotch candy. He talks in a tranquilizing “Hey Girl” coo. Before taking Alice to bed, he purrs, “Got anything from IKEA I can assemble?” But he’s no fantasy man; Meyers-Shyer smartly makes him too selfish for that. Instead, she emphasizes his immaturity: the face that looks airbrushed, the ego that’s never taken a hit, the heart that’s never dealt with any relationship more complicated than a college fling. Occasionally, he gives a grand speech about his passion for film, which to the movie’s credit, no one takes seriously. He’s also gloweringly jealous of Austen — a beat that the movie considers both foolish and endearing, like a kid sulking over a participation trophy — while demanding total devotion from his creative partners, aspiring screenwriter George ( SNL escapee Jon Rudnitsky) and his own actor-brother Teddy (Nat Wolff.) To anyone who’s survived dating 27-year-old, just-moved-to-town, wannabe directors, Harry’s more strung up with red flags than Chinese New Years. During the scene where he talks over his own black-and-white film while showing it to Alice in bed, the theater seats in LA will shudder like a 5.6 earthquake. If you reject Alice and Harry’s affair, don’t worry. The movie does, too. (There’s an editing fumble where we can’t tell if they spent the night together, and it doesn’t really matter.) Home Again is a modern rom-com, which means it barely believes in love at all. Today’s scripts focus on flinging two misfits together for a moment of connection. The goal isn’t picket-fence bliss — what a snooze — but the kind of bittersweet ending where audiences can imagine one of the lovers alone on a beach 40 years later smiling at a shirtless memory of what’s-his-name. These romances celebrate personal empowerment. They value the self higher than the couple, cueing the credits before anyone has to make a permanent sacrifice.

A decade ago, Reese Witherspoon used to star in completely phony rom-coms, like the one where her spirit falls in lov e with a widower while she’s in a coma, or the one where she’s a softball player forced to choose between a cheating pitcher and a corporate geek indicted for embezzlement, which was so awful it killed off the entire genre. It’s good to see her sparkle again in something more honest about the struggle of finding a good relationship. She’s the rare star who’s become even more human and relatable after two and a half decades of fame, the best version of your best friend from high school. But Home Again still relies on nonsense contrivances to drag its couple past scene one. After Alice and Harry smash into each other at a bar on her birthday, the one night a year she allows herself to act out., there’s no way they’d talk again unless, er, her mother insists he and his filmmaker friends crash at her guest house until they can afford their own apartment. “Be a patron of the arts,” Lillian wheedles. Someday, Alice might get to brag that these self-described “boy wonders” used to use her towels.

Left unmentioned, of course, is the idea that Alice might get to brag about herself. She’s no further along in her career ambitions than these twenty-something bros. Now a newly launched interior designer, Alice’s sole client is a toxic socialite (Lake Bell) who clearly thinks Alice is a no-talent zero, and the film isn’t much more invested in her success. However, the script is devoted to the Hollywood climb of the wunderkind bros, who take several meetings with a horror producer (Reid Scott) modeled after Jason Blum, who thinks their short could become an Oscar contender and improve his cred. (Hey, it worked for Blumhouse and Whiplash .) He also suggests rewriting it to be a female-driven comedy, the number one thing he claims to be interested in making, but quickly gives that up after two seconds of push-back. “Forget women,” he grins, and moves on.

In these moments, Home Again feels like it would rather be a Hollywood satire—or really, a sigh-tire, as it grumbles instead of jokes. This is Meyers-Shyer’s debut, but, like Alice, the young writer-director is a daughter of Hollywood. Her parents Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer collaborated on Private Benjamin , Baby Boom , Father of the Bride , and The Parent Trap , divorcing just after Meyers began directing. Home Again has an eye for the crazy-making local customs: the mansion squatters thoughtlessly eating the owner’s leftover Nobu, the conversations that abruptly end when someone takes a phone call, the balding adults who are just as immature as boys, and the fear in Alice’s eyes when the boys freak out about her famous family. Once again, she’s gone from being herself to being merely her father’s daughter.

Meyers-Shyer registers Alice’s alarm, and the daddy issues driving her bad dating habits. But the movie is too sunshiny for psychoanalysis. It keeps things upbeat, even if Jason Blum could make it a horror movie with barely any tweaks, the tale of a woman and her two daughters succumbing to the full charm offensive of three moochers and an ex-husband who don’t want to leave her house. This film about a woman is really about all men around her — in one scene, all four men burst into Alice’s bedroom to declare their goals while she’s simply trying to dress for dinner. Instead of exploring her own happiness, she just gets to build a boundary to keep the rogues out.

Fourteen years ago, Nancy Meyers’ Something’s Gotta Give was considered daring for paying attention to the sex lives of middle-aged wealthy women. Today, Home Again has the rotten timing to hit theaters in a moment when audiences shun the thought that someone with a fancy kitchen has a problem worth filming. Yet, in its own way, Home Again is as personal of a film as the ones Alice’s father made, and Harry vows to make. I can’t help giving it my empathy, if not my respect. I just wish Meyers-Shyer took herself as seriously as do her fictional auteurs.

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AFRAID ★★★½

(M) 85 minutes

Long ago, in the late 1990s, Chris Weitz was part of the team behind the raunchy comedy American Pie , a smash hit that took a far breezier view of adolescent sexuality than Hollywood would offer today. Afraid , which Weitz wrote and directed, is an indication of how times have changed: a cautionary tale about the perils of new technology told from the perspective of a worried dad, likably played by John Cho, who appeared in American Pie in the small but memorable role of “MILF guy 2”.

John Cho and Katherine Waterston play Curtis and Meredith, whose lives are taken over by an AI system in their home in Afraid.

In 2024, as Weitz sees it, the kids are not all right. They’re sexting, they’re hooked on video games and TikTok, their anxiety mounts whenever they’re removed from their screens. And then there’s the looming threat of AI, the central subject of Afraid (and a source of concern for filmmakers and other creators in the real world, as was evident during last year’s Hollywood writer’s strike).

Cho’s character, Curtis, is a marketing whiz assigned to help sell a high-tech “digital assistant” known as AIA (voiced in upbeat, youthful Californian tones by Havana Rose Liu). First, though, he has to take home a prototype and introduce it to his family, including his scientist wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) and their three kids.

Physically, AIA poses no evident threat: her design is sleekly minimal, a sphere perched above a small arch like an idol on an altar. All she does is offer sensible advice – for instance, setting up a points system that rewards the kids for doing chores, turning household management into one more game.

John Cho reunites with his American Pie director, Chris Weitz, for the horror-thriller Afraid.

Soon, though, a more sinister side emerges: AIA starts bonding separately with each family member, soothing their insecurities and encouraging their hidden desires. It’s classic horror-thriller stuff – but a bit closer to home than usual since the scenario can be taken as a barely heightened metaphor for anyone’s relationship to the internet.

It wouldn’t have been hard for Weitz to push this theme into still more uncomfortable territory. But he doesn’t have the instinctive nastiness of a born horror director and is also limited by the need to ensure the film stays suitable for younger teens – which, again, seems to be more of an issue in Hollywood currently than in the era of American Pie .

Still, as satiric social commentary, the movie crams a good deal into its 85 minutes, touching on everything from self-driving cars to deepfake porn to those inane videos for pre-schoolers with tinkly earworm theme tunes, which aren’t necessarily AI-generated but might as well be.

Crucially, Weitz grasps that the most unsettling thing about AIA’s real-world equivalents isn’t their alien novelty but the way they mirror human nature, revealing qualities in their designers and users that were present all along.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering about the ultra-generic title, the rationale is that you can’t spell “afraid” without “ai”. I don’t hold this against the movie, but it does seem like just the kind of lame marketing gimmick an AI could have come up with.

Afraid is released in cinemas on August 29.

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‘Reagan’ Review: The Gipper Takes on Moscow

In this unabashed love letter to former president Ronald Reagan, Dennis Quaid fights the Cold War with conviction.

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By Glenn Kenny

In his long career, Dennis Quaid has sometimes played politicians. He’s been former President Bill Clinton (“The Special Relationship”) and was the president in the musical comedy “American Dreamz” with Hugh Grant and Willem Dafoe. Now, in “Reagan,” Quaid portrays former President Ronald Reagan with, if not brilliance, at least evident conviction. Time truly holds surprises for all of us.

The movie, directed by Sean McNamara from a screenplay by Howard Klausner, opens with Quaid as the 40th president leaving a speech site and walking right into an assassination attempt. The picture then moves to present-day Moscow. Jon Voight plays Viktor Petrovich, a retired K.G.B. agent with an accent straight out of “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” who narrates the story of Reagan to a younger functionary. And so we shift back to the 1980s, and then back to Reagan’s early years in radio and Hollywood. (Mena Suvari plays Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman, and Penelope Ann Miller is Nancy.)

In the first eight minutes, the movie makes as many temporal shifts as a 1960s Alain Resnais work, albeit quite less gracefully.

Why is Reagan’s story relayed by a K.G.B. guy? Because in this unabashed love letter to the former president, Reagan was the force behind the fall of the Soviet Union. The movie implies that this “evil empire” collapsed as a result not just of his presidency, but of his anti-Communist activism during his entertainment career in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. These eras are depicted in scenes strongly suggesting that before shooting, the cinematographer, Christian Sebaldt, happened upon a fire sale on diffusion filters at the camera store.

The cast is dotted with cameos from the actors Lesley-Anne Down and Kevin Dillon; the prominent Hollywood conservatives Kevin Sorbo and Robert Davi also appear as seals of approval, one infers. It all makes for a plodding film, more curious than compelling.

Reagan Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.

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‘reagan’ review: dennis quaid headlines an overly reverential tribute to a controversial politician.

Jon Voight, Mena Suvari and Penelope Ann Miller also star in the biopic directed by Sean McNamara ('Soul Surfer'), which hits all the major events of the former president's life and career.

By Stephen Farber

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Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan became the subject of The Reagans . Starring James Brolin and a superb Judy Davis, the very controversial TV movie elicited scornful reactions from Reagan acolytes and barely made it to the airwaves. But no one should have similar reactions to the reverential Reagan , starring Dennis Quaid as the former president. No one, that is, except people looking for a sharp, lively piece of cinematic entertainment.

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Perhaps the strangest choice is to have the story told by a former KGB officer (Jon Voight) who gives Reagan (whom he calls “the Crusader”) credit — or blame — for the downfall of the Soviet Union during the late 1980s and early 1990s. No mention is made of the return to KGB values under the reign of Vladimir Putin, perhaps because that would complicate the story and displease the nostalgic moviegoers presumed to be the primary audience for this glossy tribute to Reagan.

Most of the major events in Reagan’s life are covered, but few of them are recounted in an incisive fashion. We see him when he was president of SAG and got involved in the anti-Communist frenzy of the late 1940s. In one scene, he even banters with the most famous of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo (Sean Hankinson), and he is enlisted by studio chief Jack Warner (a miscast Kevin Dillon) to help root out the Red threat in Hollywood. There are a few scenes with Reagan’s first wife, actress Jane Wyman — but she’s made out to be a shallow shrew in order to build up his lifelong bond with Nancy Davis (Penelope Ann Miller), which leaves Wyman actress Mena Suvari with nothing to play. An end title informs us that Wyman ended up voting for her ex-husband twice when he ran for President. How would anyone know? Aren’t ballots supposed to be secret?

The highlight of the film, and perhaps of Reagan’s life, was his 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It was indeed a rousing moment, but one might question whether that alone caused Communism to topple. Mikhail Gorbachev himself, portrayed sympathetically by Oleg Krupa, probably played a role here.

Quaid has been given puffy, rouged cheeks to match the familiar image of Reagan, and while his performance is competent, he never matches the charm that he conveyed in The Right Stuff or Great Balls of Fire . Miller takes a very different approach from the one that Davis took in The Reagans , where she portrayed Nancy as Lady Macbeth in high heels. Nevertheless, Miller makes an appealing presence and does convince us of Nancy’s lifelong devotion to her Ronnie. Other members of the very large cast don’t have enough to do to make much of an impression. It is nice to see Lesley-Anne Down as Margaret Thatcher, some 45 years after her starring roles back in the 1970s.

Technical credits are solid. Scenes filmed at the Reagan ranch in the Santa Barbara area have a special luster. The most moving moments, however, are the newsreel shots of Reagan’s funeral, which Thatcher and Gorbachev attended. No screenwriter was able to meddle with that footage.

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We Finally Know the Title of the New 'Jurassic World' Movie

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In an exciting revelation for fans of the Jurassic franchise, the title and plot of the highly anticipated next installment have been unveiled. Titled Jurassic World Rebirth , the film is set to hit theaters in July 2025, with the story set to promise a fresh and thrilling direction for the series.

Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion , the planet's ecology has largely become inhospitable to dinosaurs, with the remaining creatures confined to isolated equatorial environments. The plot centers on a daring mission led by covert operations expert Zora Bennett, played by Scarlett Johansson , to secure genetic material from the world's three most massive dinosaurs. This material is crucial to developing a groundbreaking drug with life-saving potential.

The story takes a dramatic turn when Zora’s team encounters a shipwrecked family, stranded on a mysterious island with a dark secret. As they navigate this treacherous environment, they uncover shocking truths that have been hidden from the world for decades, setting the stage for a gripping and suspenseful journey.

Who's Involved With 'Jurassic World Rebirth'?

Johansson is joined by a stellar cast , including Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis and Mahershala Ali as team leader Duncan Kincaid. Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Luna Blaise also star in the epic adventure directed by Gareth Edwards , known for his visually stunning work on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and last year's The Creator . The film's screenplay is penned by David Koepp , the original Jurassic Park screenwriter, adding an extra layer of both nostalgia and excitement.

Steven Spielberg serves as an executive producer, ensuring he will play an important role in the legacy of the series he created . Spielberg’s innovative use of CGI and practical effects brought dinosaurs to life in a way that had never been seen before, captivating audiences and creating a cultural phenomenon. His influence on the franchise continues with Jurassic World Rebirth , where he returns as an executive producer, ensuring that the essence of the original films is maintained while allowing the series to evolve. Spielberg's involvement in Jurassic World Rebirth adds an extra layer of anticipation for fans, as his storytelling instincts and attention to detail have been critical in maintaining the franchise's quality over the decades.

As the film gears up for its July 2025 release, fans can expect a thrilling continuation of the story that began over 30 years ago under Spielberg’s masterful direction. Stay tuned to Collider for more on Jurassic World Rebirth .