Released 1996
Stars Catherine Keener, Anne Heche, Liev Schreiber, Todd Field, Joseph Siravo
Directed by Nicole Holofcener

The prologue of "Walking and Talking" shows two preteen girls intently studying The Joy of Sex. As the story resumes, the characters, now thirtysomething, are still best friends. But then Laura's boyfriend proposes marriage, and her first thought is that Amelia is not going to be thrilled at this news. Amelia is a smart, good-looking brunet who for some reason is not lucky at love. Now she finds herself making small talk with the clerk at the video store, who eventually gets up the nerve to ask her out on a date--to a monster-movie fan convention.

Laura is more confident of her future. Her fiance, Frank, designs costume jewelry, hates most of his work, but hopes to do better. He is also curiously detached some of the time, and we begin to wonder about him, especially when he refuses to have the doctor look at a mole on his shoulder. Is he harboring a deadly disease? One of the gifts of "Walking and Talking" is that it remains subtle and gentle about that possibility and others. Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, it is not a soap opera or a melodrama, and many of our fears, about Frank and others, do not materialize. One thing I like about the film is the way it teasingly introduces elements that, in other films, would lead to big dramatic formulas, and then sidesteps them.

The clerk, whose name is Bill, is one of the treasures of "Walking and Talking." We have met people exactly like him. He doesn't talk fast, but he thinks before he talks and is not as much of a nerd as his tastes in movies would imply. "You're really pretty," he tells Amelia at one point, and then adds: "You look like you really need to hear it." He has a good reason for not calling her back, which the movie handles wonderfully in a scene where Amelia finally confronts him in the video store.

How did I feel at the end of "Walking and Talking"? The earth didn't shake, and I didn't feel in the presence of great cinema, but I felt cheerful, as if I had gone through some fraught times with good friends and we had emerged intact. And I found myself remembering Bill, the video clerk and Fangoria reader, and wondering how his book is coming along. He's writing the life of Colette.

By Roger Ebert