The Holiday
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, and Jack Black

If you’re wondering what Cameron Diaz (my favorite funny woman), Jude Law, Kate Winslet, and Jack Black are all doing in a film together, ask the film’s writer, director, and producer Nancy Myers. As the pen behind “Something’s Gotta Give” and “Irreconcilable Differences” among many other hit films, she wrote the roles in “The Holiday” specifically for those actors.

L.A. city girl Amanda (Cameron Diaz) and English country lass Iris (Kate Winslet) couldn’t be more different but they do have one thing in common: man trouble. Amanda’s boyfriend Ethan is a self-involved cheater and Jasper, Iris’s soon-to-be-married boyfriend isn’t much better. Frustrated and dreading a lonely Christmas, the women meet online at a home exchange website and decide to swap houses and lives for a few weeks. When Amanda arrives at the remote homestead of her British counterpart, she hopes to relax and rejuvenate and ends up falling for Iris’s brother Graham (Jude Law). Iris loves Amanda’s citified digs and fast-paced life. She meets a nice guy too, named Miles (Jack Black). The two women are happy to have finally found a good man, but what happens when they leave and go back to their separate lives?

This film opens nationwide on December 8th.

The Painted Veil
Starring: Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, and Live Schreiber

“Sometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people.”

Directed by John Curran (“We Don’t Live Here Anymore”), this film is based on the classic novel of the same title. A British couple living in 1920s China, Kitty and Walter Fane, are young, attractive, and miserable. Kitty and Walter didn’t marry for love and their differences soon create a gap between them. Kitty, who comes from an upper-class family, looks down on Walter’s middle-class standing. Walter, in turn thinks that Kitty is snobby, spoiled, and shallow woman. When the opportunity arises for Kitty to have another relationship, she eagerly begins an affair with the handsome Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), who is the English Vice Consul. The passionate tryst is soon discovered by Walter himself, who takes an extreme measure to make Kitty pay for her affair.

As a physician, Walter volunteers to relocate to a distant but beautiful village in China that is suffering terribly from an outbreak of cholera. Taking the longest possibly route, the couple arrive at extremely modest dwellings and frightened villagers. After the difficult trip, Kitty resents Walter more than ever and distracts herself by offering to help Walter at the inadequately staffed hospital. At the hospital, Kitty begins to help care for the sick children and gradually begins to let down the wall that she has built around herself. As Walter and Kitty work valiantly to help save the sick villagers while trying to keep from getting infected themselves, they see a different side of one another and finally fall in love.

This film is currently available on DVD.