When Court Foster moves in next door, the sisters become rivals as Dani experiences her first feelings of affection and Maureen finds the true love she's longed for. Hailed by Roger Ebert as a wonderful movie and a meticulously prepared masterpiece, this poignant coming of age story about the highs and lows of first love. The young players are all appealing, though Witherspoon already looks like the stand-out star character actress she would become, while Sam Waterston and Tess Harper, suffering showing in every line on their faces, struggle as the beleaguered farmer parents, perhaps equating the hard time they are having on the land with the way neither of their careers ever quite fulfilled their acting promise. Fourteen-year-old Dani and her older sister Maureen have always shared everything. It opens with a pan down from a gorgeously glowing moon - photographed by an astronaut from an angle it is impossible to see from Earth, but never mind - to a picturesque Louisiana farmhouse.Ī scratchy Elvis smooch number plays on the soundtrack as two young girls exchange cornpone profundities on the porch, and you know you’re in for another coming-of-age movie in which the wistful longings of adolescents are examined against the soft-focus hard realities of life in a simpler bygone America, with the hard knocks sustained by the adults in the plot implicitly hanging over the futures of the bright-eyed kids.ĭirector Robert Mulligan, who made the enduring classic To Kill a Mockingbird and the forgotten hit Summer of '42, specialised in wistful coming-of-age dramas, and this is a perfectly acceptable entry in the bittersweet nostalgic sub-genre, remembered mostly as Reese Witherspoon’s debut feature. But when Court meets Maureen, the sparks really fly and Maureen falls in love with him too. Court meets Dani at the local swimming hole and they are immediately attracted to each other through Court, Dani experiences her first true and perfect love.

Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, Gail Strickland Directed by: Robert Mulligan. Moving into the house next door is a handsome seventeen-year-old boy, Court Foster (Jason London).

This is one of those ‘after that summer, nothing would ever be the same again’ films. A couple's (Sam Waterston, Tess Harper) two daughters catch the eye of their new teenage neighbor in 1957 Louisiana. The Man in the Moon (1991) achieved an average score of 76 and has generally received very positive reviews. The heartwarming coming-of-age film set in the 1950s stars Reese Witherspoon as a 14-year-old girl who gets her first difficult lesson in love.

Man on the moon movie 1991