Sliding Doors

I am so enamored with this kind of film. How many people have asked the question after having an accident or chanced upon something, "If I had only left a minute later, none of this would have happened." Now we get into the who time continuum thing and parallel universes. I know this isn't a science fiction film, although a Twilight Zone episode may have fun with this plot. When we are dealing with the characters colliding through the fourth dimension, a whole different set of circumstances are put in motion. The reason we can never travel back in time (while forward is possible) is that time would then become mutable and what we are may no longer be and then we wouldn't travel back in time. Two roads diverge in a woods paraphrasing Robert Frost, but what if we could take each of those roads and see what happens. This movie is quite magical and does the best it can to get Gwyneth Paltrow through her parallel universes and see the things that one would see. I think the problem is that unless we get into quantum physics, it's hard for the average person to really reconcile these sorts of events. I thought the acting was very good and believe things as they unfurled. I would recommend this film if you like to think about the possibilities it envisions. Try it on yourself sometime and extrapolate your own existence from some fork in the road and imagine what may have been.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Helen Quilley, she works in Public Relations and is dating an idiot who is cheating on her (come on guys, would you?) After losing her job she heads home early, and the film then follows two Parallel realities, that cross over and intertwine in a very clever manner, that adds a great deal to the movies quality.

One way, she gets home and finds him cheating, and the other way she is mugged and her boyfriend gets away with it, at least for now.

In this wonderfully charming romantic comedy, great performances from, Paltrow, Lynch, Hannah and Tripplehorn plus a good script and some good laughs all add up to a movie i simply don't tire of. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, i just love it.

9/10 and a must for Paltrow Fans

This film is a lightweight comedy/drama with a unique story. Although Gwyneth Paltrow plays the same character in both aspects of the story, both Helens seem completely different. The flow of the story seems quite natural and the cast does a wonderful job going through the twists and turns of their characters lives. It's a chick flick with none of the sap.

S!icing Doors is a very sweet, moving, almost charming comedy, it's a smashing what if story, what if you just made a small change, never caught a train, how would your life go, this film tells that story.

It's hard not to empathise with Helen, she's a sweet character, well meaning, and on the receiving end of a selfish, scheming partner. Paltrow does a cracking job here, made at a time when her popularity was pretty huge, John Hannah perhaps steals it for me.

It has more humour than I remember, there are several laughs throughout, it's good to see how good Paltrow's timing is.

I really did enjoy the soundtrack, some cracking songs, including Aqua's Turn back time, what a difference to Barbie Girl.

7/10.

I don't remember reading a thing about this movie when it originally appeared, and that's odd because I enjoy Gwyneth Paltrow's work. I caught up with it on DVD, and I thought it was a superior movie with an extremely interesting premise and splendid performances by Paltrow's co-stars. Without giving too much away, the film deals with two separate scenarios that evolve from Paltow's (a) catching or (b) missing a subway train. The director manages skillfully to lay the two stories down alongside one another without confusing either one. Although the two Paltrows are distinguished by different hair styles, even that isn't really necessary. She (becomes) happy in one story, desperately unhappy in the other. She succeeds (eventually) in one story, fails in the other. She is the same character but entirely different. As she proved in "Shakespeare in Love," this girl can act. There aren't many films where chance causes alternate fates that are followed through to a rather surprising end. Worth seeing for that reason alone. Plus Gwyneth Paltrow, of course.