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Death at a Funeral
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 30 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 58 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama
Written by: Dean Craig
Directed by: Frank Oz
Release Date:
Theatrical: August 17, 2007
DVD: February 26, 2008
Running Time: 90 minutes, Color
Origin: Germany / UK / USA
Summary
RATING: R for language and drug content
Starring Matthew Macfadyen, Andy Nyman, Keeley Hawes, Ewen Bremner, Daisy Donovan, Alan Tudyk, Jane Asher, and Peter Dinklage
On the morning of their father's funeral, the family and friends of the deceased each arrive with his or her own roiling anxieties. Son Daniel knows he will have to face his flirty, blow-hard, famous-novelist brother, Robert, who's just flown in from New York, not to mention the promises of a new life he's made to his wife Jane. Meanwhile, Daniel's cousin Martha and her dependable new fiancé Simon are desperate to make a good impression on Martha's uptight father--a plan that literally goes out the window when Simon accidentally ingests a designer drug en rout to the service. Then there's the mysterious guest who threatens to unveil an earth-shattering family secret. As mayhem and unfortunate mishaps ensue on every front, it is up to the two brothers to hide the truth from their family and friends and figure out how to not only bury their dearly beloved, but the secret he's been keeping. (MGM)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Bowfinger Dirty Rotten Scoundrels In & Out Little Shop of Horrors The Score The Stepford Wives What About Bob?
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
The humor manages to be simultaneously sophisticated, supremely silly and very dark.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Schickel
Insanely funny, if occasionally out-of-control, black farce.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
The lack of propriety and solemnity is precisely what makes this comic farce so uproariously funny.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The movie is part farce (unplanned entrances and exits), part slapstick (misbehavior of corpses) and part just plain wacky eccentricity. I think the ideal way to see it would be to gather your most dour and disapproving relatives and treat them to a night at the cinema.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
It takes a while for Frank Oz's ensemble black comedy Death at a Funeral to hit its deliriously nutty stride. But when it does, the laughs don't stop until the movie, like the subject of its family get-together, has taken its last breath.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The film's climax is nothing short of hilarious. And Death at a Funeral doesn't discriminate when it comes to the type of humor it embraces it. Everything is in there, from physical hijinks to verbal repartee to naked man jokes to drugs and gross-out stuff.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Sid Smith
Death at a Funeral is lethal farce, combining hints of "The Lavender Hill Mob," doses of Joe Orton and a smidgen of the Farrelly brothers' scatology in its mix.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
It has the requisite amount of knockabout silliness.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
Though it grows silly and sentimental, Funeral scores enough big laughs to make its shortcomings eminently forgivable.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
The mostly British ensemble can do this stuff in their sleep, but Macfadyen and Donovan and Graves, especially, work up the necessary antic angst and silliness.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The movie maintains its comical, rocky equilibrium as long as the screenwriter, Dean Craig, sticks to domestic disasters and a Monty Python parody of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
This combination of tightly controlled farce and gross-out comedy works unexpectedly well, until the filmmakers lose their nerve at last and settle for cozy homilies. Still, four-fifths of a rarity is about twice as much as studios deliver nowadays.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White
Although set in England with a predominantly British cast, Death at a Funeral is no stiff-upper-lipped comedy, but a lean, mean, and often crude, farce.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Shows us how funny farce can be -- even with the hokiest of premises -- in the hands of the British.
Read Full Review >Variety John Anderson
With a circus parade of mourning Brits and enough appalling circumstances to set proper Englishness back to the Dark Ages, Death at a Funeral pits decorum against sex, drugs and dysfunction.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
This topsy-turvy funeral produces a number of smiles, giggles, pleasant guffaws and several solid, sustained laughs. Not a bad batting average as comedies go.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
It goes soft, but even a gelded traditional farce is more potent than most of our slob comedies.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Matt Zoller Seitz
There’s no dearth of rude humor on screens right now, but Death at a Funeral stands apart because its characters -- mostly reserved upper-middle-class British folk who have gathered to bury a patriarch -- are determined to keep a stiff upper lip no matter what.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
If your taste runs in this direction, you're bound to be amused.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Toddy Burton
A comedy that's refreshing in its courage to embrace tradition and just have fun.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
The dumbness doesn't kill Death at a Funeral, but it certainly weakens it.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Death" builds slowly and inexorably to a comic explosion that's just too good -- too insanely, impossibly mortifying -- to spoil here. Let's just say it dwarfs everything that has come before it.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Most British actors are awfully good at underplaying the overwritten, and this group, headed by Matthew Macfadyen, Rupert Graves and Daisy Donovan, is no exception -- where others would mug, they demitasse.
Read Full Review >Empire James Dyer
A sole potty joke is unnecessarily crass, but for the most part this is joyfully funny.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
By the end of Death at a Funeral's effortful farce about busted British propriety, you may feel that peculiar facial ache that comes from wishing to laugh with no really satisfying release.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Robert Wilonsky
Death at a Funeral never even approaches the best of Oz's oeuvre. It's his first movie that begs for the laugh track; they'll love it on BBC America.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
The movie is a gentle British ensemble comedy much like "Four Weddings and a Funeral" - minus the four weddings and four-fifths of the wit.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joanne Kaufman
"Wrong" is the operative word with Death at a Funeral, which in the first very funny 30 minutes shows its hand and then, unfortunately, continues to wave that hand frantically for the next hour.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
While trying so hard to have such a good time, the movie simply forgets to be funny, and begins to grate before the body even cools.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell
Modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.7 (out of 10) based on 58 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Mike H gave it a10:
Get's better and better every time you watch it!
Joey W. gave it a10:
Quite possibly the most side splittingly hilarious film I have ever seen.
Tiago M. gave it an8:
The most hilarious film ever made!!! Perfect!
Ron S gave it a10:
Not really laugh-out-loud humor (except for a few parts) but very funny nonetheless. British comedies in general usually have that particular sense of humor that is fun to watch. "I *knew* it!" That was great.
Other G. gave it an8:
Wow, that was weird, I thought maybe I had reviewed this and didn't remember. Weird. Except I liked the movie unlike that other Grant C. This was a great example of British comedy in its prime. Care free, not like one of our American comedies that are purely about stupidity. And the deal about gays in this story was not to insult gays, just as a small humorous piece of the story.
Christopher J. gave it an8:
Great characters, great twists, no message--just for laughs.
LOLgrantC Cod gave it a7:
Grant you give homosexuals a bad name. Hell, you give human beings a bad name. Please develop a sense of humor and try not to set us back any more years. kthnxbi The movie was decent; not meant for british comedy snobs.
