Autumn in New York (2000)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Brilliant and touching

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Blistering performances.

This movie is typical of one that has all the necessary ingredients for a hit... except the heart. Great cinematography, great cast, and the most beautiful New York scenes you would expect, but still it fails miserably. As the wonderful actor Joan Chen's first directorial debut, she did her best, albeit with the wrong project. As Shakespeare once said so long ago, "The play's the thing." In other words, without a great story, not matter how much money you throw at the project, it falls flat, and this writer is certainly no Shakespeare. When you combine cliché dialogue, with flat, unbelievable situations and poor character development, no amount of glamorous shots or pretty music can fill the chasm between fantasy and reality. And as much as I emotionally wanted to go along for the ride, alas, this film started out a romantic walk through Central Park, then slipped on the ice and fell flat on its face.

"Autumn in New York" stars Richard Gere as a middle aged man who falls for the the considerably younger Charolette Fielding, played by Winona Ryder. Fielding's your typical free-spirited pixie, who just happens to be dying, a death which will teach Gere several lessons about love, loss and commitment.Whilst "Autumn" is a giant bag of clichés, Ryder's enchanting. Beautiful but fragile, and reminiscent of a young Audrey Hepburn, she single-handedly saves the film. "Autumn in New York" was the first major Hollywood film to be directed by a woman of Asian origin.7/10 - Worth one viewing.

Well it's a movie about a woman dying in scorbutus (Ryder) and her guy (Gere) basically watching her die with these pathetic sad eyes, without buying any vitamin c or anything and it's not like he didn't have any drugstore around the corner. It's always better to make a tear-jerker movie about a sad couple who spend their days crying and hoping that maybe vitamin-c itself is coming to the door saying "here I am, eat me". We'll it ain't gonna happen folks. It's a story about a woman who did not eat enough vegetables. As you mama said, eat your vegetables. The result is that you live a miserable life in a luxury apartment in New York doing nothing but worrying about things that don't matter and wondering around spending your pointless life.

Winona Ryder gives this movie the 50% it has -- her performance was nuanced and she hit almost exactly the right tone.But Richard Gere was badly miscast opposite her. This role required a total transformation of the spirit -- a goofy, pleasure-seeking arrested adolescent relentlessly stepping into the depths of grief as his life morphs from an endless party into a bleak disaster. Richard Gere's smooth, relaxed style was unable to carry the weight of this transformation, showing us little of the feelings that passed behind his blank facade.The direction and design missed tons of opportunities to make the visual tone and rhythm support the arc of the story. Instead of starting out with bright, busy colors and a noisy, bustling tone mirroring the playboy's lifestyle, progressing to lovely sunlit vistas in the flowering of the affair, then slowly fading to the stationary, monochromatic starkness of the lovers' fate, it struck the same atmosphere throughout of gentle mumbling amid browns and grays. The soundtrack of detached, sophisticated jazz ballads also did a bad job of conveying the story's wrenching emotional transformation.This wasn't the worst movie I've ever seen, but it had the potential to be so much more than it was, and its many errors distracted so much from the potential of its story that it ultimately held me back from enjoying it much. This would be an excellent candidate for a remake by a more ambitiously emotive team. There are plenty of young actresses who could do this role well. The trick would be finding a leading man who can match her performance.