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  • Traveling with Her
  • Two Women
  • Sally
  • Keep Coming Back
  • Eros
  • Cactus Pears
  • According to Otto
  • #1 Happy Family USA
  • Newborn
  • Where the Wind Comes From
  • Love Bites
  • Four Seasons (The)
  • Fear Street: Prom Queen
  • Brooklyn Butcher (The)
  • Étoile
  • Midnight in Phoenix
  • Grotesquerie
  • Sudden Outbursts of Emotions
  • Idyllic
  • Spermageddon
  • La Joia: Bad Gyal
  • Sobre las olas
  • Arthur Erickson: Beauty Between the Lines
  • Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance
  • Pee-wee as Himself
  • Pwede G, pwede B
  • Alien: Romulus
  • Male Gaze: Reality Bites (The)
  • Mariliendre
  • Things Like This
  • Last First Time (The)
  • Sylvia Robyn
  • Sorry, Baby
  • Reset
  • Ramón y Ramón
  • President's Wife (The)
  • Inside
  • Ten Pound Poms
  • Culinary Uprising: The Story of Bloodroot (A)
  • Fuori

Next Best Thing (The)

Country: USA, Language: English, 108 mins

  • Director: John Schlesinger
  • Writer: Tom Ropelewski
  • Producer: Leslie Dixon; Gary Lucchesi

CGiii Comment

Schlesinger's final film and, unfortunately, it is a forgettable fluffy foray.

Basically, an inferior re-working of The Object of My Affection.

Madonna has a rather strange accent, the story is, by the end, thoroughly objectionable and it feels like a TV movie.

It should have been huge at the box office...but, it bombed - quite rightly so.

Watchable as long as you keep your expectations low.

A sad end to a blistering career.


Trailer...

The(ir) Blurb...

A comedy-drama about best friends - one a straight woman, Abbie, the other a gay man, Robert - who decide to have a child together. Five years later, Abbie falls in love with a straight man and wants to move away with her and Robert's little boy Sam, and a nasty custody battle ensues.

Cast & Characters

Madonna as Abbie Reynolds;
Rupert Everett as Robert Whittaker;
Benjamin Bratt as Ben Cooper;
Illeana Douglas as Elizabeth Ryder;
Michael Vartan as Kevin Lasater;
Josef Sommer as Richard Whittaker;
Malcolm Stumpf as Sam;
Lynn Redgrave as Helen Whittaker;
Neil Patrick Harris as David;
Mark Valley as Cardiologist;
Suzanne Krull as Annabel;
Stacy Edwards as Finn;
John Carroll Lynch as Abbie's Lawyer;
Fran Bennett as Judge Tracey Bennett;
Ricki Lopez as Angel