This is a sweet film about community, kindness and personal transformation. When a Miami-based driven woman headed for the C-suite lands in Minnesota, she has some lessons to learn about life and what it means to be human. The story's conflict and romance work well. It's so nice to see a film that's not full of violence, terror or sex. Love it!

I enjoyed the movie mostly because I live in Minnesota. The movie wasn't filmed here as is obvious from the weather; it does not get that cold here in November anymore. Several errors were irritating. First, New Ulm is in southwestern Minnesota, not the southeast. Second, the first day you can go ice fishing is not a state holiday. The Twin Cities, where Lucy takes Bobbie to get her hair done, is a 3 hour round trip. And finally, the Mayo Clinic is in Rochester, two HOURS away from New Ulm, not a few minutes away. If you are going to set a movie in a specific city, RESEARCH it first.

Directed by Jonas Elmer, "New In Town" stars Renne Zellweger as a big city consultant who finds herself transferred to small town Minnesota for the purposes of overseeing a failing factory.Resolutely formulaic, the film watches as Zellweger teaches the locals a little about big city life, whilst they in turn expose her to the charms of small town Minnesota. Along the way, Zellweger feuds, falls in love with, loses and reclaims a sexy single dad who also happens to be a union boss. To see these clichés done about as well as they can be done, see "Local Hero".5/10 – Worth no viewings.

Just as a Random Number Generator is put to use in statistics and cryptography, Hollywood seems to employ a Random Romantic-Comedy Generator to churn out fluff like New In Town. For this one, they set the generator to bland and pushed the "Minnesota people are funny" button to produce a shallow and erratic but marginally amusing film that is entirely supporting by the subjective charms of Renee Zelwegger. If you like her, you won't mind this. If Zelwegger grates on you, watching this movie will feel like being dragged at high speed over a gravel road.Lucy Hill is a corporate executive from Miami dispatched during winter to a plant in New Ulm, Minnesota to handle its retooling for a new product line and the elimination of half the workforce. She arrives to meet a colorful cast of small town characters, including a handsome and abrasive union leader (Harry Connick Jr.). In a development that won't surprise any living thing on Earth, including the bacteria living in my commode, Lucy falls in love with both the townspeople and the union rep and when her bosses announce they're shutting down the plant entirely, she has to find a way to salvage both the livelihood of the community and her budding relationship.Now, I like Zelwegger so I found New In Town to be Perfectly Acceptable Entertainment. Yes, it's predictable and obvious and unoriginal and stumbles from one rom-com cliché to another without any structure or direction. Lucy Hill is a cipher, her love interest is practically an absentee character and the only reason the two of them wind up together is because there's literally no one else in the story they could be with. But there's nothing jaw-droppingly stupid about any of the plot, none of the characters have to act like compete and total morons to keep the story going and there are persistent attempts at humor through the whole thing. As chick flicks go, this is not a pain to sit through.The Random Romantic-Comedy Generator did manage to spit out a couple of interesting concepts, but they go criminally underutilized. Early on it's established that the workforce at the plant has made a habit of running mangers out of town and there are moments when New In Town almost wanders into a more lively and unexpected story about the conflict between an ambitious executive who cares only about her career and the subversively devious employees who don't take kindly to outsiders telling them how to run "their" plant. There's also a second where it seems like the movie might use scrapbooking as a metaphor of the difference between small town permanence and the disposable world of on-the-go corporate existence. Neither of those opportunities are recognized or taken advantage of.If you hate rom-coms and/or Zelwegger with a passion, this motion picture is not for you. If you like either or both, New In Town will be an okay way to kill 97 minutes. You know which group you belong to.