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Donna's Favorite Movie Stars Renee Zellweger Donna's Cool Movies

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Cold Mountain (2003) Movie Showtimes Freely adapted from Charles Frazier's beloved bestseller, Cold Mountain boasts an impeccable pedigree as a respectable Civil War love story, offering everything you'd want from a romantic epic except a resonant emotional core. Everything in this sweeping, Odyssean journey depends on believing in the instant love that ignites during a very brief encounter between genteel, city-bred preacher's daughter Ada (Nicole Kidman) and Confederate soldier Inman (Jude Law), who deserts the battlefield to return, weary and wounded, to Ada's inherited farm in the rural town of Cold Mountain, North Carolina. In an epic (but dramatically tenuous) case of absence making hearts grow fonder, Inman endures a treacherous hike fraught with danger (and populated by supporting players including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and others) while the struggling, inexperienced Ada is aided by the high-spirited Ruby (Renée Zellweger), forming a powerful farming partnership that transforms Ada into a strong, lovelorn survivor. Amazon.com Movie Showtimes

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Down with Love (Full Screen Edition) (2003) The bright, glossy world of Doris Day and Rock Hudson sex comedies gets a self-aware brush-up in Down with Love. Pillow-lipped Renée Zellweger (Chicago) plays Barbara Novak, the author of a bestselling book called Down with Love that advises women to focus on their careers and have sex à la carte--just like a man would. Determined to prove that Novak is just as vulnerable to love as any woman, dashingly chauvinist magazine writer Catcher Block (ever-charming Ewan McGregor, Moulin Rouge) pretends to be a courtly astronaut who wouldn't dream of putting his hand on a woman's knee. This piffle of a story seems like nothing more than an excuse for ironic double-entendres and dazzling production design, until a sneaky plot twist suddenly raises the stakes for the movie's end. As he always does, the brilliant David Hyde Pierce (Frasier) scores the most comic points as Block's fussy editor. Amazon.com DVDs

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The Next Generation (1995) Amazon.com DVDs

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Me, Myself & Irene (2000) In Me, Myself & Irene, Jim Carrey plays Charlie Baileygates, a cop for the best police force in the world (Rhode Island). In denial about his wife's affair, he's a nice guy who goes around trying to do the right thing but is taken advantage of every step of the way. Instead of confronting people, he takes the abuse, balls it up, and hides it in the pit of his stomach. His psyche can only take so much, though, and soon his alter-ego Hank pops out to do every libidinous thing Charlie would never do. It's a great premise for a Jim Carrey film. Amazon.com DVDs

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Chicago (Full Screen Edition) (2003) Bob Fosse's sexy cynicism still shines in Chicago, a faithful movie adaptation of the choreographer-director's 1975 Broadway musical. Of course the story, all about merry murderesses and tabloid fame, is set in the Roaring '20s, but Chicago reeks of '70s disenchantment--this isn't just Fosse's material, it's his attitude, too. That's probably why the movie's breathless observations on fleeting fame and fickle public taste already seem dated. However, Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones are beautifully matched as Jazz Age vixens, and Richard Gere gleefully sheds his customary cool to belt out a showstopper. (Yes, they all do their own singing and dancing.) Whatever qualms musical purists may have about director Rob Marshall's cut-cut-cut style, the film's sheer exuberance is intoxicating. Given the scarcity of big-screen musicals in the last 25 years, that's a cause for singing, dancing, cheering. And all that jazz. Amazon.com DVDs

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Jerry Maguire (1996) One of the best romantic comedies of the 1990s, this box-office hit cemented writer-director Cameron Crowe's reputation as "the voice of a generation." Crowe could probably do without that label, but he's definitely in sync with the times with this savvy story about a sports agent (Tom Cruise) whose fall from grace motivates his quest for professional recovery, and the slow-dawning realization that he needs the love and respect of the single mom (Renée Zellweger in her breakthrough role) who has supported him through the worst of times. This is one of Cruise's best, most underrated performances, and in an Oscar-winning role, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays the football star who remains Jerry Maguire's only loyal client on a hard road to redemption and personal growth. If that sounds touchy-feely, it is only because Crowe has combined sharp entertainment with a depth of character that is rarely found in mainstream comedy. Amazon.com DVDs

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The Whole Wide World (1996) Director Dan Ireland shows a talent for authenticity with this heartbreaking love story based on Novalyne Price's 1988 account of her prickly romance with 1930s pulp-fiction writer Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. She was a schoolteacher in a small Texas town; he was the odd-ball writer who lived at home and created comic-book characters that were sexier and more violent than was considered decent by the locals. Renée Zellweger's performance is a gem of sweet unconventionality matched by Vincent D'Onofrio's powerful show of eccentricity and increasing mental illness. Though smart and feisty, this leaves us wishing the filmmakers had dug deeper into Howard's unusual relationship with his manipulative mother. Amazon.com DVDs

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Nurse Betty (2000) A frenzied, screwball comedy with a lighter-than-light touch, Nurse Betty is a radical departure for director Neil LaBute, who helmed the vitriolic In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. Betty (Renée Zellweger) is a perky Kansas waitress whose sole happiness comes from her obsession with the television soap A Reason to Love, starring dreamboat doctor David Ravell (Greg Kinnear). When her slimy car-dealer husband (Aaron Eckhart) enters into a drug transaction that goes horribly awry, Betty inadvertently witnesses the carnage and, in shock, becomes Nurse Betty, determined to reunite with her long-lost love, Dr. Ravell. Tailed by two hit men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock), Betty heads to L.A. a determined woman, unaware she has their huge drug stash in tow. Though it takes a good half-hour to get going, once LaBute and the movie hit top speed, it's a surreal, often brilliant ride, as Betty's fantasy and reality collide, with unexpected (really unexpected) developments. The screenplay (by John C. Richards and James Flamberg) is wickedly inventive, and like his previous films, LaBute has assembled a peerless cast. Zellweger is charming and daffy in her best performance since Jerry Maguire, and Freeman is by turns menacing and touchingly romantic in his obsession with Betty. Kinnear is the epitome of self-serving shallowness (and makes us love him all the more for it), and Rock finally shakes his standup persona and emerges as a great comic actor. Look also for a scene-stealing Allison Janney as the producer of Kinnear's soap. Most movies rarely get such talent operating at full capacity, and Nurse Betty soars because of it. - Amazon Amazon.com DVDs

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A Price Above Rubies (1998) This widely acclaimed motion picture features outstanding performances from Renee Zellweger (JERRY MAGUIRE, BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY) and Julianna Margulies (TV's ER, THE NEWTON BOYS). Sonia (Zellweger) is a young woman who always did just what was expected: she married the right man, moved to the right neighborhood, and had a beautiful baby. And yet, when she discovers an exciting world beyond her tightly knit community, it sparks a growing desire for independence that threatens the security of the perfect life she knows. See A PRICE ABOVE RUBIES for yourself, and learn why critics and audiences nationwide have praised this passionate movie gem! Amazon.com DVDs

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One True Thing (1998) Based on Anna Quindlen's bestselling novel, this is a mother-daughter and father-daughter story, two for the price of one. But director Carl Franklin also tries to inject a police-mystery angle that it neither needs nor will support. Renee Zellweger plays a young writer on the rise, who has finally gotten her break for a New York magazine. While home for a birthday party for her nearly famous writer father (William Hurt), she learns that her mother (Meryl Streep) has been diagnosed with cancer. Then her father does the unthinkable: He all but commands her to put her career on hold to take care of her mother and nurse her through her illness. Dad, a popular college professor who has never gotten the literary acclaim he always believed he deserved, essentially checks out--and daughter must play parent to her mother. Strong performances by Streep and Zellweger give this parent-child relationship the heart--and the anger--of the real thing, while Hurt seems slightly disembodied as the self-involved father whose needs have dominated both women. Still, the detective-story aspect (the film is told in flashback, as the cops try to discover whether someone slipped Mom a fatal dose of morphine) is a construct that could have been done without. Amazon.com DVDs

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Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) Featuring a blowzy, winningly inept size-12 heroine, Bridget Jones's Diary is a fetching adaptation of Helen Fielding's runaway bestseller, grittier than Ally McBeal but sweeter than Sex and the City. The normally sylphlike Renée Zellweger (Nurse Betty, Me, Myself and Irene) wolfed pasta to gain poundage to play "singleton" Bridget, a London-based publicist who divides her free time between binge eating in front of the TV, downing Chardonnay with her friends, and updating the diary in which she records her negligible weight fluctuations and romantic misadventures of the year. Things start off badly at Christmas when her mother tries to set her up with seemingly standoffish lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), whom Bridget accidentally overhears dissing her. Instead she embarks on a disastrous liaison with her raffish boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, infinitely more likeable when he's playing a baddie instead of his patented tongue-tied fops). Eventually, Bridget comes to wonder if she's let her pride prejudice her against the surprisingly attractive Mr. Darcy. Amazon.com DVDs

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