It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Rebecca Lott, a thirtysomething. college lecturer, is widowed when her husband Ben is killed by a car while jogging. The rest of the film is taken up with Rebecca endlessly talking over her emotional problems with her younger sister Lucy, her best friend Sylvie and her former stepmother Alberta. There are subplots about Lucy's romance with Stephen, one of Rebecca's students, and Rebecca's brief romance with a handsome young man hired to paint her house. The film ends with the four women performing a bizarre quasi-pagan ritual designed to help Rebecca cope with her grief. And that's it.The film is what used to be called a "woman's picture", but with one major difference. The traditional "woman's picture" had as its primary character a strong female figure, with the male characters as secondary ones, defined in terms of their relationship to her. Here the primary character is the rather passive figure of Rebecca, with Lucy, Sylvie and Alberta as the secondary ones and the male characters, insofar as we see them at all, vague tertiary ones. The film-makers are, essentially, trying to make a film about the romantic and emotional lives of a group of heterosexual women while airbrushing men out of the picture as far as possible. Ben never appears (his death is announced right at the beginning of the film), and Rebecca and Lucy's father Thomas only appears briefly. (Their mother Joanna died from cancer fourteen years earlier). Stephen is a minor character and Sylvie's husband Paul an even more minor one, although we learn that their marriage is an unhappy one. The nearest thing to a major male character is The Painter, and it is noteworthy that we never learn his name and that he is played not by a professional actor but by a rock star with virtually no previous acting experience.The result is that the film ends up devoid of any dramatic conflict or tension. The nearest we get is the suggestion that the two sisters, especially Lucy, resent their stepmother for usurping their mother's role in their lives. Yet we do not sense from the film itself that Alberta, who is supposed to be a hard-bitten career woman, has done anything that might provoke resentment; indeed, she treats the sisters with great kindness, doing far more to console Rebecca, who was only briefly her stepdaughter, in her bereavement than does her father. Stephen Holden of the New York Times, called the film "a genteel, buttoned-up soap opera", which strikes me as being unfair to soap operas, much as I dislike that particular genre. "Moonlight and Valentino" is around four times the length of an episode of most British soaps, and any scriptwriter for "Coronation Street" or "East Enders" would soon find themselves out of a job if they wasted four entire episodes with as little drama or action as is included in the 105 minutes of this film.I watched this film when it was recently shown on television largely because the cast included two actresses I had admired in other films, Gwyneth Paltrow in "Sylvia" and Kathleen Turner in films like "The Accidental Tourist" and "Serial Mom". Unfortunately, it turned out to be a big disappointment to me, which was not really the fault of Paltrow, Turner and the two other leading actresses, all of whom gave the impression that they could do much more with better material. (Although if Whoopi Goldberg wants to be taken seriously as a serious actress as opposed to a comedienne, she might consider getting rid of her childish stage name. Naming herself after a whoopee cushion was not perhaps her greatest career move).Instead the fault lies with the script, based on a play by Ellen Simon, who unfortunately does not seem to have inherited the dramatic talents of her more famous father Neil, and with David Anspaugh's direction. Roger Ebert described it as "very sincere, very heartfelt and very bad", a judgement from which I would not dissent, although I would also add very tasteful, very sensitive and incredibly boring. The whole thing is done with the sort of excruciatingly ghastly good taste that makes you long for someone to say or do something tasteless just to relieve the monotony of four people sitting round being nice to one another. 4/10

I saw this film shortly before watching In Her Shoes with Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz. There are a lot of similarities between the two films. They both have great casts and good acting. They both have stock characters of sisters who are very different, an offensive stepmother, a woman friend/confidant, an emotionally unavailable father, a dead mother and a surprise lover. Both films have the characters experience life-changing realizations and both films suffer from a kind of 'love conquers all' sentimentality. They both add a little titillation with Cameron Diaz in black underwear and a partial back shot of Gwyneth Paltrow naked.Both films seem contrived, as if the writers of the works the films are based on did market research and said, "Ok, there's a market for stories about relationships between women, so I'm going to write about two sisters with an offensive stepmother…" In other words, instead of the drama emerging from the truth of the relationship, the relationship is invented to fit the dramatic situation. It seems forced, the characters don't seem real, the relationships are unbelievable.The resolution of the tensions between the characters is simplistic with simple apologies completely whisking away years of acrimony leaving everyone feeling warm and fuzzy ever after. It's just not real. Romantic fantasy.The characters in In Her Shoes are a little more overblown than Moonlight & Valentino, especially the stepmother part. Sydelle Feller, in In Her Shoes is so evil that it is difficult to believe that the father would stay with her, or even marry her in the first place. Kathleen Turner at least shows some emotional vulnerability as the stepmother in Moonlight & Valentino.If you liked Moonlight & Valentino you will probably like In Her Shoes as well. Enjoyable performances in both, in fact, the actors bring depth to their parts that goes way beyond the contrived sentimentality of the scripts.

I just got finished watching this movie last night. I had always wanted to see it and so when it unexpectedly came on tv last night, I decided to watch it. Well...I have mixed feelings about this movie.****************NOTE!! SPOILERS!!!!*************************I thought the acting overall was good...I was a bit dissapointed however in Perkin's character, and how emotionless she was after he husband died. I know that part of this was because she was partly shocked and in denial, but still....I expected a STRONGER outburst of emotion from her. This is your HUSBAND that has just died for goodness sakes! Not only that, but I felt like this movie tended to go on and on with not real point. IT felt very boring at times, and just plotless. I liked how the movie focuses on each of the women's lives and the problems they are facing in them, however if I were the director, I would have had the movie continue on with a slightly FASTER pace. The movie felt like 2 hours long when I had only watched an hour of it!Bottom line: I didn't even finish this movie because it was just sooo slow and kind of boring. I was already tired to begin with...I didn't need this movie to put me even faster to sleep. However, if you want a good chick flick about women overcoming thier problems in life, then this movie is for you. The acting is great (except that little part I mentioned above) and the it's a touching story about enduring hardships, and moving on with your life after a tragic death.

The movie does not leave you with anything, and it seems as though it wanted to. Gwyneth is annoying as usual; her character is to blame too. Whoopi is vivid and charming. Kathleen's character is interesting and real. It sounds like a list, and the movie also does. As Elizabeth Perkins character, it is too neat and structured. The movie's name Moonlight and Valentino makes you expect Bon Jovi to come and effect something, but all he does -after much too long in the film- is steer Elizabeth to a scene that may have worked in the play the movie is based on, but I'm not so sure. All in all: uneven. Most of the time I wanted to see these characters in different situations, perhaps doing something or saying anything. The small storylines are interesting than Elizabeth dealing with the death of her husband: Whoopi and her husband (uncredited Peter Coyote), and Gwyneth and Kathleen. Liked hearing REM's Strange Currencies at the background, and Canda's beautiful.