Nights in Rodanthe: Critic Reviews

Even keepers of the Sparks flame are likely to have their spirits dampened by the wind-rattled, Diane Lane and Richard Gereencrusted adaptation of Nights in Rodanthe.

It's no wonder the faithful continue to forsake the movies, given junky embarrassments like Nights in Rodanthe.

Indoors, there is elegant if unconvincing emotional drama you can see coming from half a mile down the beach, with very little com to lighten the rom.

Though the stars are likable and attractive, the movie is a melodramatic and soppy affair.

What really sells this three-hanky tear-jerker -- and there were a lot of women buying it during a recent screening -- is Lane's steely and vulnerable performance. Like Tinker Bell, she almost made me believe in fairies. Almost.

About those Nights in Rodanthe: They're about as steamy as a cup of tea.

It's an increasingly rare pleasure to see two naturally aging adults onscreen, and it's not exactly hard work to watch this still-gorgeous pair fall in love. Especially if you're overdue for a little vacation from reality yourself.

Richard Gere suffers less than Diane Lane. He gets by with a mixture of skill and self-irony. She acts up a storm in every scene, but you root for the hurricane.

The movie attempts to jerk tears with one clunky device after another, in a plot that is a perfect storm of cliche and contrivance.

The comparative savvy that Wolfe showed in HBO's stage-to-TV transfer of Lackawanna Blues has gone missing.

This romantic stinker is one of those films in which every plot development becomes a life lesson and every gesture is weighted with significance.

Rodanthe is a reliably steamy stormy sultry story about Inner Change at the Outer Banks where strangers become intimates.

The story needs rage and poetry and red-blooded sensuality, and we get respectable stodginess.

There's nothing like a good tearjerker. Unfortunately, Nights in Rodanthe isn't a good tearjerker, although the characters on-screen shed tears and the movie is pretty jerky.

A classy tearjerker with butter-cream frosting, raised to the level of (maybe undeserved) artistry by the convincing sincerity and no-nonsense honesty of Diane Lane.

It's the sort of film, frankly, one either utterly succumbs to or stubbornly resists, and those opting for the former course shouldn't be disappointed.

Nights in Rodanthe aims straight for the tear ducts as well, but this weepie is a dry well.

The movie version of Nights begins with such promise before it drowns in the romance novelist's syrupy sentimentality.

No character in this turbulent sea of love crashing on the shores of misfortune is any more developed than they are in Sparks' potboiler.

There are not enough actual scenes to keep us sufficiently engaged to care about the third-act event that changes their destiny.

The movie around Lane and Gere is unreal, a tortured construct, but they open a breathing space in its center.

I can kind-of, sort-of see how this story might work as a novel. Bad dialogue doesn't sound as howlingly awful when not spoken aloud. Idiotic plot contrivances don't seem as painful and obvious.

Nights in Rodanthe is typical Nicholas Sparks fare that has been turned into a tasteful melodrama courtesy of the easy chemistry between its two leads and a generally restrained touch from Tony-winning director George C. Wolfe in his feature debut.

You would pretty much have to be sentimental to tolerate such schlock, or at least be willing to check your cynicism at the multiplex door.

...the film ultimately earns a place for itself within the pantheon of effectively stirring romantic tearjerkers.