I’ve got a conflict between tomorrow night’s all-media screening of Anne Fletcher‘s Hot Pursuit (Warner Bros., 5.8) and an 8 pm performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time tomorrow night. The play wins, of course, but that means not seeing the film until late May because (a) I leave Thursday night for Paris, (b) for some reason the film isn’t opening in France until September 9th (“openings of American comedies tend to lag by months [here],” says a Paris-based critic friend) and (c) it won’t open in Prague until May 28th.

Sofia Vergara, Reese Witherspoon in Anne Fletcher’s Hot Pursuit.
Here, in any event, is a portion of one of the first reviews, posted yesterday by Westword‘s Stephanie Zacharek: “The flagrant silliness of Hot Pursuit is a plus, not a liability. Directed by Anne Fletcher, [it’s] a quiet triumph of tone and timing. Nearly every scene is cut at just the right point, often topped off with a fantastic kicker of dialogue. While self-deprecation is integral to humor, self-humiliation is a trickier, more delicate business, particularly when it comes to comic roles for women. Thankfully, Hot Pursuit — with its script by David Feeney and John Quaintance, both of whom have thus far been writing mostly for TV — avoids gags of the ‘Darn! I broke my heel!’ variety.”