This often entertaining comedy/romance set in the Washington bureau of a TV news network has three excellent, Oscar-nominated performances from William Hurt, Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter as the central characters. All the daily drama of a hectic newsroom is there - last-minute changes, missing tapes, large egos and difficult bosses - skillfully put together by writer/director James L Brooks, who made the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment. Hurt is exactly right as the charming, manipulative ex-sportscaster whose ability to succeed without the requisite brain-power is a source of huge irritation to Hunter's workaholic TV producer, convincingly torn between the professional and the personal life. And Brooks is perfect as the best friend (who of course harbours deeper affections for Hunter). But the film is stolen from all of them in a guest cameo by Jack Nicholson, silkily sharklike as the head office anchorman who controls lives both literally and through a twitch of his mouth on screen. The drama encompasses most human emotions in its two-hours-plus, but it is really about what people are like inside when their exterior personalities are stripped away. Not quite as involving, though, as perhaps it might have been.

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