Runtime: 1 hr 58 mins
Synopsis: A Previous Engagement is a sophisticated comedy written and directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin (Honeymoon), starring Juliet Stevenson (Bend it Like Beckham, Truly Madly Deeply), Tcheky Karyo (The Good Thief, The Patriot), Daniel Stern (Home Alone, City Slickers) and Emmy Award-winner... [More]
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Juliet Stevenson, Tcheky Karyo, Daniel Stern, Valerie Mahaffey, Simon Woods
Despite the occasional detour into mawkishness, "A Previous Engagement" nicely balances unutterable truths about marriage and love with the comedy that is human interaction and the unending drama that is man and women, repulsion and attraction.
Top Critic
[H]its every single damn note in precisely the wrong way... strains for screwball and misses entirely...
A little...have gone a long way to offsetting the film's sticky sweetness.
This is a romantic comedy where the romance is too fraught with implications for a comedy, and the treatment of character is too flippant for a romance.
While this slow-starting update of Private Lives has plenty of laughs, the incredibly expressive Stevenson turns Julia's romantic dilemma into something genuinely moving. She makes A Previous Engagement something special.
Director Joan Carr-Wiggin intends to strike a blow for frustrated wives and mothers everywhere, but her unimaginative mixture of obvious farce and feeble midlife crisis harangues gives everything the whiff of interminable theater.
Top Critic
While it has a good cast and what might have been a reasonable story, it's a movie that lacks courage.
Though frantic from the get-go, A Previous Engagement rarely finds its feet. Devoid of the fine balance of grace and chaos necessary to any screen farce, the proceedings are slapdash, repetitious and badly overextended.
More tired than the fantasy it promotes, A Previous Engagement aims at middle-aged women with the subtlety of a pitch for bladder-control medication.
Top Critic
Carr-Wiggin doesn’t have the chops to pull off a romantic farce, but she’s so game for the attempt that we patiently wait for the movie to steer a steadier course.
Stevenson is so incandescent -- so funny, so vulnerable, so awkwardly sexy...that she lifts writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin's ordinary middle-aged rom-com above all its abundant clichés.
There are a few laughs in A Previous Engagement, but not nearly enough.
Middle-aged malaise is certainly underrepresented on screen, and maybe this is why.
Alternatively contrived...and on-the-nose...adding up to a cookie-cutter romantic comedy.
A great actress even in a not-so-great comedy is fully worth the price of admission in these far from halcyon days, both movie-wise and world-wise.
It's the rarest of all things: an intelligent, sophisticated romance with real meat on its bones.
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