New in Town
In this romantic comedy, Renée Zellweger plays an uptight Miami businesswoman who temporarily relocates to New Ulm, Minnesota, where she falls in love with a local union rep played by Harry Connick Jr.
New in Town
Directed by Jonas Elmer
(PG-13)
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
*
A career woman moves from Miami to small-town Minnesota.
January is “known as a graveyard for bad movies,” but New in Town takes the cake, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. In a romantic comedy that’s “unfunny at best and borderline-amateur at worst,” Renée Zellweger plays an uptight Miami businesswoman who temporarily relocates to New Ulm, Minn., and unexpectedly falls for a local union rep, played by Harry Connick Jr. The fish-out-of-water premise is so familiar that “every deadly dumb scene predicts the way it’s going to end.” The formulaic title of director Jonas Elmer’s film “should indicate how utterly bereft of creativity New in Town truly is,” said Christy LeMire in the Associated Press. New Ulm seems populated by the most “stereotypically folksy folks” imaginable, who come across as parodies of the characters in Fargo. The women like scrapbooking, the men like ice fishing, and everyone uses cutesy phrases like “You betcha” and “okey-dokey.” Zellweger is “equally unconvincing,” said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. Her performance, like the movie itself, “operates on automatic pilot.”
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
June 25 editorial cartoons
Cartoons Wednesday's cartoons include war on a loop, the New York City mayoral race, and one almighty F-bomb
-
How generative AI is changing the way we write and speak
In The Spotlight ChatGPT and other large language model tools are quietly influencing which words we use
-
How long can Nato keep Donald Trump happy?
Today's Big Question Military alliance pulls out all the stops to woo US president on his peacemaker victory lap