Writer-Director Brad Silberling had more to deal with than grief when his actress girlfriend, Rebecca Schaeffer, was killed by a stalker in 1989: There was his relationship with her parents. Out of that sorrow, Silberling has fashioned a movie about a guy named Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal) who sticks around his murdered fiancée's Massachusetts town to go into the commercial real estate business with her father, Ben (Dustin Hoffman). Ben's wife, JoJo (Susan Sarandon), uses humor to ease the pain, but things get worse when the family lawyer (Holly Hunter) fails to bring the killer to justice. For a story based on truth, the emotions play as counterfeit. The actors all have splashy speeches that ring theatrical and false. Add the contrivance of sex between Joe and a similarly bereft postal clerk, shrewdly underplayed by Ellen Pompeo, and the film falls into the teary trap that In the Bedroom avoided. Silberling's past films (Casper, City of Angels) trafficked in goo; this one sinks in it.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."