Lately, most of Dustin Hoffman’s roles have been grinning crackpots or talking animals, so accepting the 71-year-old actor as a romantic lead who could fetch the likes of Emma Thompson requires some suspension of disbelief. In this harmless love story for the senior set, he plays a lonely jingle writer who flies to London for his daughter’s wedding and gets pushed to the margins by his ex-wife and her second husband; Thompson is a similarly lonely hospitality worker at Heathrow who’s begun to despair of ever finding that special someone. Writer-director Joel Hopkins resorts to a fair amount of contrivance to stress their sadness, and the story dutifully follows the standard boy-meets-girl arc, though in this case the boy is a little too old to be chasing women around airports. With Kathy Baker, James Brolin, and Eileen Atkins. PG-13, 92 min.
Last Chance Harvey
PG-13 • 2008