Then She Found Me

Academy Award-winning actress Helen Hunt makes her feature directorial debut with this adaptation of Elinor Lipman's best-selling novel about a Philadelphia schoolteacher (Hunt) whose long-lost birth mother (Bette Midler) reappears at the very moment her daughter is careening into a midlife crisis. ...more

There is a significant amount of schmaltz at the heart of Then She Found Me, the film adapted from Elinor Lipman's 1990 novel. The plot could easily have been lifted or borrowed from a Lifetime made-for-TV movie, but the careful direction of its star and director, Helen Hunt, in a decidedly unpretty, self-deprecating role as a woman in an ugly situation, keeps the film from collapsing under the schlocky weight of the source material. In the film, a plain Jane named April Epner – a quietly ...more

As a first-time co-writer/director, Helen Hunt carries a strength untouched even by many filmmakers with 20- or 30-year histories in the business: the ability to swiftly navigate her actors through emotionally complex sequences, layered with the behavioral contradictions and uncertainties of real life. Consequently, numerous sequences in Hunt's feature debut, Then She Found Me, flower with a level of ingenuousness that feels astonishingly fresh and open. To put it bluntly, Hunt is an actor's ...more