November (2005)

Image credit: November: Michele Asselin

CLEAN UP ON AISLE FIVE A grieving photographer suffers through her cruelest month

In November, Courteney Cox plays Sophie, a photographer whose boyfriend (James Le Gros) is murdered during a convenience-store robbery. And in keeping with the arty look of the indie drama (shown at Sundance in 2004), director Greg Harrison's somber story of guilt, memory, and darkroom techniques can perhaps be described as an homage to the work of David Hockney: Just as Hockney assembles smaller, overlapped Polaroids that don't necessarily make sense into a big picture that does, so Harrison, working from a script by Benjamin Brand, reveals the full circumstances of a violent crime through a flickering series of scenes modified in repetition.

The depth of the story and the characters (including Anne Archer as Sophie's mother and Nora Dunn as her therapist) is awfully slight to bear the weight of such fancy editing. But the performances are crisp and in focus, with Cox in particular showing a photogenic feel for expressing grief.