The Invisible Circus

A teenage girl travels to Paris in the 1970s trying to find out about her sister's suicide, and falls in love with her dead sister's boyfriend.

AMG Plot: A young woman trying to better understand the fate of her sister finds herself following in her footsteps in this emotional drama. 18-year-old Phoebe (Jordanna Brewster) has been haunted by the memory of her sister Faith (Cameron Diaz), who died under mysterious circumstances while travelling through Europe several years earlier. Looking for closure, Phoebe decides to retrace her sister's journey in hopes of finding out what happened to her. In the course of her travels through France, Portugal, and the Netherlands, Phoebe crosses paths with Wolf (Christopher Eccleston), Faith's boyfriend, and finds herself falling for the man her sister once loved. Based on the acclaimed novel by Jennifer Egan, The Invisible Circus also features Blythe Danner and Camilla Belle. The film marked the directorial debut for screenwriter Adam Brooks. — Mark Deming

AMG Review: A mostly tiresome travelogue posing as a movie, The Invisible Circus has all the elements of an engrossing tale of sibling bonding and societal unrest, but writer/director Adam Brooks gives everything a glossy, unconvincing presentation that more closely resembles a muddled TV film than anything. The actresses give the film some much-needed depth and emotion, particularly Cameron Diaz, who overcomes possible miscasting with an observant, sympathetic performance for such a sketchily detailed character. For a film centering around political activism and period woes, it never finds the heart of any its situations, botching the opportunity to give those predicaments a contemporary validity. Eventually, the film succumbs to its dopey, hippie-dippie assumptions about such events, and a romantic interlude between Jordana Brewster and Christopher Eccleston is silly and mostly trivial when considering the implications of it all. This picture served as a replacement for another 2000 Sundance Film Festival premiere, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, which couldn't be completed in time for the ceremony. — Jason Clark