Hoax, The

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Gere is terrific at suggesting the kind of addictive cocktail of excitement, panic, chutzpah, creativity, and naked hunger for fame and megabucks that might inspire such big, fat lies.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Thanks to Hallstrom's slaphappy artistry and a sparkling ensemble, Hoax is a hoot.

Newsweek David Ansen

Comedy and suspense, satire and shame are all mashed together--with breezy confidence.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Gere gives 'em the old razzle-dazzle with his roguish charm and sharp comic timing. The surprise is the unexpected feeling he brings to this challenging role.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The Hoax lures you in with its captivating performances.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

The Hoax makes the fakery of disgraced writers Jayson Blair, James Frey and Stephen Glass seem puny by comparison. Irving was the grand master, and Gere's portrait and Hallström's movie suggest why: He almost bought his own story, believed his own outrageous pack of lies.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Assuming the bulk of what we see is factual, it comes off as a gripping docudrama.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

It's an accomplished potboiler entertainment, as calculated and clever as the stories Irving spins to stay afloat in the growing sea of his own lies.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

The result is an unexpectedly satisfying fantasia of reality and imagination, a meditation on the nature of lies and deception, on how we come to embrace not the truth but what it suits us to believe.

The Hollywood Reporter Richard James Havis

Entertaining and piquant. The film does possess some of the bittersweet qualities that usually mark Hallstrom's films, but it's generally a tougher, more incisive work that ranks as one of his best.

Variety Deborah Young

Lasse Hallstrom's breezy, fast-paced, somewhat loose-ended account of how he (Irving) did it offers a surprisingly layered vehicle for a maniacally conniving Richard Gere, backed up by a superb Alfred Molina as his accomplice.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

It is for the most part a jumpy, suspenseful caper, full of narrow escapes, improbable reversals and complicated intrigue. But it has a sinister, shadowy undertow, an intimation of dread that lingers after Irving's game is up.

Empire Staff (Not credited)

Gere proves that there’s more to his range than ageing romantic leads in a multi-layered tale of public fraud and self-deception.

Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt

The Hoax isn't Gere’s best movie (that honor will always and forever belong to "Days of Heaven"), but it might feature his best performance.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Hallström conveys a bit of the circuslike atmosphere of the times. But he overreaches in trying to turn the film into a commentary on the politically corrupt 1970s.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Seeks to set the record straight. But Gere's sneaky, ingratiating presence keeps it dishonest to the last frame.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

Wheeler's script is a buzzing contrivance, and Hallström's direction is brisker than almost anything he's ever done. So by all means enjoy The Hoax -- it's smart fun. Just don't buy it.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Isn't all it could have been. But the filmmakers catch the right glittery look and paranoid intensity, and they make gutsy speculations about the story beneath the story.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

A personal story with broad implications for the culture as a whole.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Hugely entertaining because director Lasse Hallstrom and screenwriter William Wheeler have greatly embellished the "truth" in Irving's book about the hoax.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The only thing missing from The Hoax might be a couple of songs. It's that breezy and fleet a movie.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Wheeler and director Lasse Hallstrom don't want us to take anything too seriously.

Miami Herald Robert W. Butler

The film is not only a good deal of malicious fun, but it gives Gere his best role ever.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

An entertaining botch of a movie.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

The movie is too long (nearly two hours), but the acting--Gere, Molina, the peerlessly edgy Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden as Irving's loopy Swiss-German painter wife--keeps you giggling. And the story has something up its sleeve--a dream finish.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Their kinship (Gere/Molina)--wholly unsexual yet lit, like that of Martin and Lewis, with an exasperated love--is the beacon of the movie, and it just about survives the lengthening shadows of the later scenes.

Time Richard Schickel

Gere and Molina are themselves terrific as the con men.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Entertaining though The Hoax is, the film that I imagined before I saw it was better.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's all polished and slick and credible, but it never truly engages. Perhaps it's because Irving's story is well-known; perhaps it's because of the script's repetitions and tangents; or perhaps it's simply because Hallstrom himself is ambivalent about his protagonist.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

As a movie, The Hoax isn't a fraud but it's not the real deal, either.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

It's hard to get a fix on what Hallstrom had in mind. The first half of the movie plays like a frenetic caper comedy...The second half turns psychologically dark.

Village Voice Ella Taylor

To its credit, The Hoax isn't glib--it doesn't chalk up Irving's moral vacuum to anything a bad mommy or daddy did. But there's no other point of view either; the film suffers a fatal equivocation over whether to frame him as a prankster or an American tragedy.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

Full speed ahead fun, a rollicking caper romp that hearkens back to a quainter, pre-Ken Lay age when bigtime fraud could actually entail writing books as opposed to merely cooking them.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

The Hoax is a fraud, and not a very good one at that. Stay with me here because we're about to spiral down the rabbit hole: The movie is a fictionalized account of writer Clifford Irving's fictionalized account of his own fictionalized account of wacky billionaire Howard Hughes.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The narrative engine leaves the rails when Irving, like Hughes, plunges into paranoia (though Irving actually is the object of a high-level plot) and the style turns to the sort of intensely manipulated surrealism that Charlie Kaufman practiced, not successfully, in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind."

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Even though we're caught up in his derring-do as he beguiles entire meeting rooms of jaded publishers and editors, we're kept at a dissatisfying distance from Irving and the movie.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

It's pretty perverse for William Wheeler, who scripted this feature, to get most of the facts wrong, inflating details that don't need any spin. (As Irving himself remarked, "You could call it a hoax about a hoax.")