Singleton’s treble chance

OUT NOW... HOME AGAIN (12A)

Beautiful, rich people with adorable offspring try to convince us that being single is the end of their privileged worlds – boo hoo! – in first-time director Hallie Meyers-shyer’s romantic comedy.

Home Again is cut from the same luxurious fabric as The Holiday and It’s Complicated, films penned by Nancy Meyers, the director’s proud mother. Emotional syrup evidently runs in the family because MeyersShyer drizzles gooey sentiment over every frame of her fantasy about a recently separated wife, with three potential suitors. “I’m the idiot who is dealt a winning hand and still managed to lose,” grumbles the heroine’s estranged husband when he acknowledges everything he let slip through his fingers. He’s not joking - his queen of hearts, a superwoman from Hollywood royalty, cheerfully chauffeurs the kids to school, cooks nutritious meals, runs an interior design business, cleans her sprawling Los Angeles residence without breaking a sweat, and still finds time to look expertly coiffed and styled from the moment she wakes. Perky homemaker Alice Kinney (Reese Witherspoon), whose marriage to music executive Austen (Michael Sheen) has broken down, relocates to Los Angeles where a trio of aspiring twentysomething filmmakers - Harry (Pico Alexander, pictured with Witherspoon), George (Jon Rudnitsky) and Teddy (Nat Wolff) - enter her world.