Heartburn

Though she always played coy about the fact in interviews, Nora Ephron's novel Heartburn is a thinly disguised "a clef" rehash of her marriage to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein. Meryl Streep plays Rachel, an influential food critic who marries charismatic columnist Mark (Jack Nicholson) ...more

This well-crafted but disappointing comedy-drama has talent to burn on both sides of the camera but is curiously uninvolving. The major reason for this lies in Nora Ephron's script, which never presents any believable reason for the two main characters to be interested in each other, much less married. This script also suffers from a diffuse, episodic structure that fritters away much of the story's potential for comedic or dramatic moments by lingering on everyday events that do nothing to ...more