With Superbad at number 1 at the movie box office for the second week in a row and not much else changing in the cinemas, and only two notable new movies—Mr. Bean’s Holiday, which I’m looking forward to seeing, and War, a Jet Li/Jason Statham actioner which I also mean to see but haven’t yet managed to fit into the sched), it’s a good time to look at a film that’s been in the theaters for a few weeks already.

No Reservations, the drama starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart, and Abigail Breslin, got mediocre reviews, but I rather liked it. (On the other hand, I saw it the weekend it was released but haven’t got around to writing about it until now.) Most of the negativity centered on complaints of the film’s predictability, which typically means that the reviewer didn’t find it very interesting but does not know why.

Yet there was one interesting thing about it, which the reviews appear to have missed. That is that the film is not a romantic comedy (which would explain why it is not very funny) or essential a romance at all, and is not about food and the making and enjoying of same (which has been done to death on television in recent years anyway).

What it is, and what makes it interesting to those who are not mentally deficient enough to be professional film critics, is a serious drama about a woman who has never learned how to love. Through the course of the film, we find out that chef Kate (Zeta-Jones), an intense, work-obsessed, single woman in Manhattan, never knew her father well—he ran out on the family—and never was close to her mother. Through a tragedy, the death of her single-parent sister, Kate has to raise a young girl (Breslin), and this causes her to confront her essential loneliness and try to work out an answer.

If that all sounds rather serious, well, you’re right. It is serious, and Kate’s problems all trace back to an unfortunately common phenomenon of our times—divorce—and hence the film has resonance and perhaps some important lessons for a great many people. That makes No Reservations an interesting film well worth seeing.