Stars: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey, Dabney Coleman, Jean Stapleton, Michael Badalucco, Steve Zahn, Dave Chappelle

Director: Nora Ephron

Summary: Based on the classic film The Shop Around the Corner, this tale of pen-pal romance has been updated for the internet age. Hanks plays a book mega-store owner who falls in love over e-mail with the owner of a struggling children's bookstore, played by Ryan.

WIN DVDs by rating this DVD

Average User Rating:

WIN DVDS by being amongst the first to review this DVD. Reviewing DVDs earns you bonus entries and lets you WIN DVDs!Please login before reviewing this DVD. If you're a new user, register for free and enter to WIN FREE DVDs!

By now, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have amassed such a fund of goodwill with moviegoers that any new onscreen pairing brings nearly reflexive smiles. In You've Got Mail, the quintessential boy and girl next door repeat the tentative romantic crescendo that made Sleepless in Seattle, writer-director Nora Ephron's previous excursion with the duo, a massive hit. The prospective couple do actually meet face to face early on but Mailotherwise repeats the earlier feature's gentle, extended tease of saving its romantic resolution until the final, gauzy shot.

The underlying narrative is an even more old-fashioned romantic pas de deux that is casually hooked to a newfangled device. The script, cowritten by the director and her sister, Delia Ephron, updates and relocates the Ernst Lubitsch classic, The Shop Around the Corner, to contemporary Manhattan, where Joe Fox (Hanks) is a cheerfully rapacious merchant whose chain of book superstores is gobbling up smaller, more specialized shops such as the children's bookstore owned by Kathleen Kelly (Ryan). Their lives run in close parallel in the same idealized neighbourhood yet they first meet anonymously, online, where they gradually nurture a warm, even intimate correspondence. As they begin to wonder whether this e-mail flirtation might lead them to be soul mates, however, they meet and clash over their colliding business fortunes.

It's no small testament to the two stars that we wind up liking and caring about them despite the inevitable (and highly manipulative) arc of the plot. Although their chemistry transcended the consciously improbable romantic premise of Sleepless, enabling director Ephron to attain a kind of amorous soufflé, this time around there's a slow leak that considerably deflates the affair. Less credulous viewers will challenge Joe's logic in prolonging the concealment of his online identity from Kathleen, and may shake their heads at Ephron's reinvention of Manhattan as a spotless, sun-dappled wonderland where everybody lives in million-dollar apartments and colour co-ordinates their wardrobes for cocktail parties. --Sam Sutherland

Aspect Ratio:	1.85 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Audio Commentary, Interactive Map Tour, Music only Soundtrack, Interview Gallery, Comparison, Soundbytes, HBO Special
Subtitles:	Arabic, English
Year:	1998
Release Date:	August 23, 1999
Runtime:	114 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	D 016954
Keywords:	General, Got, Wide, Screen, Romantic, Drama, You've, Mail
Genre:	Drama