The ingenious idea of writer-director Peter Howitt is to follow the same set of characters down alternative divergent paths from a given pivotal moment. (Ingenious if not altogether original: cf. Alain Resnais's Smoking/No Smoking or Resnais's original source, the cycle of Alan Ayckbourn stage plays under the title of Intimate Exchanges.) The pivotal moment, to be specific, is the matter of whether the sacked heroine catches the subway train or misses it; and thus, arrives home before her boyfriend's secret lover leaves the apartment or after, and so forth. Undemanding, eager to please, breezy, bubbly, Sliding Doors probably treats its subject -- the paths of possibility, the chain of consequence -- with all the intellectual rigor that a mass audience would sit still for. It probably, too, is as captivating as a movie can be when it also has Gwyneth Paltrow in the starring role (putting on a nasally British accent that borders on Anglophobia). The levels of polished wit and oiled charm are about on a par with Four Weddings and a Funeral, a connection that perhaps comes to mind because the Auden-quoting eulogist of the earlier film, John Hannah, is here installed in the heart-throb role of God's Gift to Gwyneth ("Never make a joke about women's hair, clothes, or menstrual cycles -- Page One"). And Hannah himself, on a par with the earlier heart-throbbery of Hugh Grant, has sufficient natural ease and assurance to mask, at least partially, the naked calculation. With John Lynch, Jeanne Tripplehorn. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd