Clint Eastwood grappling, both behind and in front of the camera, with the Robert James Waller bestseller about a four-day affair between a nomadic National Geographic photographer and an Italian-Iowan farm wife (Meryl Streep). Whatever has been or could be said about this being an American Brief Encounter, and about the mundane realism of buzzing flies and yellow-naugahyde kitchen chairs, is all very well as far as it goes. But beyond and above all that, this is a noble and gallant and heroic effort, and a triumphant one to boot. While staying essentially faithful to the book, Eastwood has a made a movie that is nothing like it. What was so false and pretentious on the page has become completely natural. What was mushy has been made firm. What was skimpy has been fleshed out. And when the director stretches out the movie, with its pastoral idling and its uncondensed dialogues, to two and a quarter hours, he goes way beyond what even the slowest reader would require to get through the (breezy, breathy) book. What, in the end, the movie is about that the novel is not about is the eroticism of taking time. (Of delayed gratification. Of extended foreplay. Of contained fires. Of checked and double-checked desire.) If it were about nothing else, it would still be unique among American movies. Its ostensible themes -- isolation, unfulfillment, the secret self -- are far from nothing, are far meatier than the standard Hollywood fare, but here they're just gravy. Annie Corley, Victor Slezak. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd