When Harry Met Sally… (1989)

“[Reiner] pulls everything together adroitly to make When Harry Met Sally a real refreshment. It’s what they call a summer picture, which means that, if it’s good as this one is-it will seem summery even in winter.” — Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic

SYNOPSIS

Can men and women ever really be friends? Rob Reiner and screenwriter Nora Ephron turn that deceptively simple question into one of the defining romantic comedies of its era with When Harry Met Sally…. Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan star as Harry Burns and Sally Albright, two mismatched New Yorkers whose contentious first meeting during a drive from Chicago develops, through a series of chance encounters spanning more than a decade, into an unexpectedly intimate friendship. Ephron’s witty, conversational screenplay finds comedy in the rituals, anxieties, and contradictions of modern relationships, but it is the extraordinary chemistry between Crystal and Ryan that gives the film its enduring emotional charge: his sardonic neurosis colliding perfectly with her meticulous optimism. Reiner surrounds them with an autumnal New York of bookstores, cafés, museums, and crowded sidewalks, creating an idealized romantic landscape in which friendship and love seem separated by only the most precarious of boundaries. Warm, funny, and remarkably perceptive about the ways people talk themselves into (and out of) happiness, When Harry Met Sally… understands that falling in love may be less about finding the right person than finally recognizing the person who has been there all along.