Director: Bart Freundlich
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Like Julia Roberts and J-Lo in recent months, Catherine Zeta Jones makes her big screen return after a lengthy absence in this agreeable romantic drama. She plays Sandy, a forty-ish mother of two who moves with her kids to the city after leaving her cheating husband and begins a relationship with mid-twenties Aram (Justin Bartha). Everything seems to be going well for a while, but will their age difference get in the way? The Rebound is rare among recent rom-coms in that is has a modicum of intelligence about it to go alongside characters we actually care about. It tosses up some believable situations, some daft ones and even a few laughs, but lets itself down when it goes for the more obvious jokes and gross-out moments. But while it’s far from perfect, a measure of maturity and taste means that a genre starved of even remotely tolerable entries for a while now can at least face itself in the mirror again.
