★★★½ My Best Friend (2006)

[Gino: 3.5, Twoshoes: 3.5]

Gino says: '(Mon Meilleur Ami) I enjoyed this film as a quiet and pleasant, if tightly-contrived film about an art dealer whose associate bets him that he can not produce to her a "best friend" within 10 days.

I was really admiring it for not indulging in silly excesses. Near the end it does one of these and takes it a little too far, thus the relatively mild recommendation of 3.5 stars from me. But still a pleasant little harmless film with likable leads.

I was thinking it would have been a terrible movie in the hands of say, Gary Marshall, and A.O.Scott at the NY times says similarly: "A comforting, sentimental tale of a kind that would be insufferably maudlin if made in Hollywood ... Somehow it's easier to take in French."'