Mira Nair

Like a slightly more educated Legally Blonde, Witherspoon plays these scenes well.

After Election and even Legally Blonde, Witherspoon seemed like ideal casting: that big, sharp—Becky Sharp!—jaw line; that crack comic timing; that laserlike stare.

In fact, the prevailing tone is pink -- the kind of pink that Reese Witherspoon, who plays Rebecca Sharp, made her trademark color as Elle Woods in ''Legally Blonde.''

Gallo, an angular and unshaven man with a haunted look, has acted for offbeat and experimental directors such as Abel Ferrara (" The Funeral "), Bille August ("House of the Spirits"), Mika Kaurismaki ("L.A. Without a Map"), Emir Kusturica (" Arizona Dream "), Claire Denis ("Nenette and Boni"), Mira Nair (" The Perez Family ") and Kiefer Sutherland ("Truth or Consequences, N.M.").

"Rachel Getting Married" is an indie feature rather than a razzle-dazzle Hollywood production—this is clear from the start with its grainy, predominantly handheld camerawork by Declan Quinn (2004's " Vanity Fair ") and abandonment of most dumbed-down writing conventions in Jenny Lumet's sterling screenplay—but it is so honest in the tough places it goes and so humane in its portrait of an ailing American family that teenage and adult viewers should be able to unconditionally latch onto and identify with it.

A huge cast of name actors like Gabriel Byrne ("Spider"), Bob Hoskins ("Maid In Manhattan"), Geraldine McEwan ("The Magdalene Sisters") and the ubiquitous Jim Broadbent, "Around the World in 80 Days") dress up the cast with their presences, but only "Cold Mountain's Eileen Atkins scores strongly as the controlling Aunt Tilly.

This is Fogelman’s The Book of Henry, the movie that made us all realize, “Ugh, Colin Trevorrow, NO.” Fogelman applies all of his most melodramatic twists and turns to Life Itself, all of his attempts at making us cry and wail and sob, and I — the person who cried at that Nike ad, at every single A Star is Born trailer, and whenever I even think about The Namesake — was utterly unmoved.

But in watching the film, which was written by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler (who wrote the far more considerate Queen of Katwe), what becomes evident is that Johansson’s presence is not the usual act of erasure, but that whitewashing is actually and obliviously built into the revamped narrative.

Yes, that's Irrfan Khan as the father, and watching him, I couldn't help but think of another 2007 movie that started in India on a train, Mira Nair's "The Namesake," and its accounting of what this kind of loss really means to family.