The Longest Ride

Directed by George Tillman Jr. and written by Craig Bolotin (based on yet another romantic wallow by Nicholas Sparks), this slick weeper tells two stories: the courtship and marriage of two Jews (Jack Huston, Oona Chaplin) during and after World War II, and a present-day romance between an art student (Britt Robertson) and a rodeo bull-rider (Scott Eastwood), with Alan Alda (as Huston's character grown old) to link the two. The movie is glossy and efficient—Sparks didn't become a multimillionaire without knowing how to push our buttons, or how to write novels that can easily be filmed—but it suffers from the fact that one of its stories is far more interesting than the other. Robertson and Eastwood are appealing and photogenic, but their romance is callow and trivial compared to Huston and Chaplin's. J.L.