How Do You Know

Lisa is a softball player whose career is thrown into doubt when she is dropped from the national team, leaving her to reassess both her future in the sport and her personal life. Around the same time she meets two men: George, a businessman whose professional troubles have left him anxious and his career under threat, and Matty, a professional baseball player whose easy charm comes with a self-absorbed streak. Each pursues her, and she has to work out what she actually wants.

James L. Brooks directed and wrote the film, and produced it with Laurence Mark and Paula Weinstein. It is the fifth feature he directed, following Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, As Good as It Gets and Spanglish. Reese Witherspoon plays Lisa, with Paul Rudd as George, Owen Wilson as Matty and Jack Nicholson as George's father, Charles; Kathryn Hahn and Mark Linn-Baker are also in the cast.

The film was released in December 2010 and runs 121 minutes. It is a major studio production, with a budget of roughly 120 million dollars against a worldwide gross of about 49 million, so it did not come close to recovering its costs. Audience ratings are modest: 5.4 on IMDb from over 53,000 votes and 5.3 on TMDB from about a thousand votes. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds 4.9 out of 10 from 150 critics, so critical and audience responses were broadly similar.