Death at a Funeral

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

The humor manages to be simultaneously sophisticated, supremely silly and very dark.

Time Richard Schickel

Insanely funny, if occasionally out-of-control, black farce.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The lack of propriety and solemnity is precisely what makes this comic farce so uproariously funny.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

It has the requisite amount of knockabout silliness.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Though it grows silly and sentimental, Funeral scores enough big laughs to make its shortcomings eminently forgivable.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Shows us how funny farce can be -- even with the hokiest of premises -- in the hands of the British.

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.

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.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

It goes soft, but even a gelded traditional farce is more potent than most of our slob comedies.

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.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

If your taste runs in this direction, you're bound to be amused.

Austin Chronicle Toddy Burton

A comedy that's refreshing in its courage to embrace tradition and just have fun.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

The dumbness doesn't kill Death at a Funeral, but it certainly weakens it.

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.

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.

Empire James Dyer

A sole potty joke is unnecessarily crass, but for the most part this is joyfully funny.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

Modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge.