The Man in the Moon

In its elegiac nostalgia for the days of childhood innocence, Robert Mulligan's The Man in the Moon recalls another of Mulligan's earlier films, To Kill A Mockingbird. Set in a Louisiana backwater town in the 1950s, the film chronicles the coming-of-age of a young teenage girl. Dani (Reese ...more

Director Robert Mulligan returns with great success to the stomping grounds of adolescent angst that proved so richly fruitful for him with To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Summer of '42 (1971). The director's facility with young actors is proven again with a knockout performance from talented teenager Reese Witherspoon, delivering a fully developed, remarkably self-assured turn alongside such intimidating veteran thespians as Sam Waterston and Tess Harper. Lacking in the sort of ...more