Romantic comedies don't really get much better than Bounce (2000), Don Roos' comparatively main-stream, yet extremely satisfying follow-up to his scintillating The Opposite of Sex. Working strictly within the rules of the genre, Bounce could be a text-book study for the writers of all the tedious romantic comedies out there on how a movie can be predictable yet endearing. That it has two good-looking stars in the lead doesn't hurt it either.

Paltrow steals the show in Bounce. Her acting is mannered and sometimes has a sitcom-like feel to it, but it's a marvellous performance right up there with Shallow Hal, Shakespeare in Love and possibly Sylvia (which I haven't seen yet. I was surprised how restrained Ben Affleck managed to be in the movie. This is his best performance, definitely. The real star of Bounce is however Roos, whose dialogue, while sometimes (but very rarely) glib, is brilliant. I am waiting for his next movie, called Happy Endings.

Oh and for those who watch Bounce on DVD, stay away from the second disc. In The commentary (Roos, Paltrow and Affleck talking about certain scenes), Roos reveals that the dialogue about "No arguments" was ad-libbed by Paltrow but Ben, frankly, sounds drunk. And when Gwen and Ben (yikes!) mention that the fact that they went out helped their performance in the movie, all you want to do is hurl the DVD out of the window.