TransAmerica

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Until it detours into dysfunctional-family comedy-drama, Transamerica rides cross-country without ever running low on bracing, cactus-spined surprises.

Film Threat Elias Savada

Transamerica is a modern-day Sullivan's Travels.

The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden

Impressively realized on all levels, this transgender spin on the road trip boasts an extraordinary central performance.

Variety Eddie Cockrell

Laugh-out-loud funny, tartly off-color and ultimately touching.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

This debut feature left me in a state of movie euphoria. Who could have guessed that such a discomfiting premise would blossom into a deadpan-hilarious and yet deeply affecting story about a singular glitch in the human condition?

Time Joel Stein

But the most impressive thing is how, a few minutes into the film, you stop noticing Huffman's external transformations and start to focus on the character. Not that the external stuff isn't impressive.

TV Guide Ken Fox

A flawed but nevertheless endearing father-son road trip with a distinctive twist.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

This drama offers a chuckle at every turn.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The movie's soul is with Huffman. Speaking in a low voice, her posture as stiff as her vocabulary, her eyes a pool of sadness and hope, she turns this small, resonant film into a cry from the heart.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Transamerica provides the frame and the occasion for one of the year's best performances, Felicity Huffman's as a woman trapped in a man's body who's passing for female while awaiting a sex-change operation.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

What a fine, tender, delicate, funny, gender-bending-and-rebending performance this is.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

What Felicity Huffman brings to Bree is the newness of a Jane Austen heroine. She has been waiting a long time to be an ingenue, and what an irony that she must begin as a mother.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

It's a farce with heart, a meditation on identity, family and gender politics that has real faith in its characters - even when the characters themselves lack it.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

It's debatable whether watching Huffman get dressed, take hormones, and learn to use a more feminine diction could sustain an entire movie, but the character is certainly a creation more original than a lot of the film itself.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

A perfect example of an ordinary movie made unique by the powerhouse performance of its lead.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

Despite its subject matter, Transamerica is a surprisingly funny movie, because Tucker never lets the pathos overwhelm his sense of humor.

Dallas Observer Bill Gallo

You might feel constrained when it comes to a standing ovation, but there's certainly enough substance and yuk here to go along for the ride.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

If Tucker's road map often feels a little too confining and the screwball comedy too contrived, he can take credit for introducing viewers to a character they have almost certainly never met before.

Slate David Edelstein

Farce born of sadly irreconcilable impulses: Bravo!

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

The real success of Duncan Tucker, who wrote and directed this debut feature, is that, through credible dialogue and sensitive performances, the basic idea overcomes its cleverness and is affecting.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Transamerica itself does not always live up to its star, but it is touching and sometimes funny, despite its overall air of indie earnestness.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Transamerica is about as sexual as "The Brady Bunch." It's about an intelligent woman in excruciating transition to a new body that will line up with an identity she's held all along.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The best, and perhaps the only, reason to see Duncan Tucker's Transamerica is for Felicity Huffman's touching, shape-shifting performance.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The unintended effect of all the melodramatic complications in Transamerica is, oddly, to distract attention from an understanding of exactly what that courage really costs.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

It may not exactly be a traditional love letter to his wife but actor-turned-executive producer William H. Macy has given her a plum part as Bree in screenwriter-director Duncan Tucker's offbeat road movie.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Huffman is a woman playing a man playing a woman, which is easily the year's most complicated turn. She does a fine, nuanced job in bringing to life a character that could have become a caricature.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

As much heralded, "edgy" movies go, Transamerica fails to live up to expectations.

Empire Olly Richards

This is actually a very middle-of-the-road movie.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Felicity Huffman is such a wonder, at once funny and brave, playing a pre-op male-to-female transsexual in the uneven comedy Transamerica that she sustains several lapses that might otherwise have sunk it.

Chicago Reader Martin Rubin

An occasionally touching, more often clumsy variation on the formula of crusty oldster and problem child bonding on a road trip. The main reason to see it is "Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman.

Village Voice Ben Kenigsberg

Pleasant even without reaching much of a destination, Transamerica leaves the basic impression that it's not as self-satisfied as it could have been.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Never lets us forget that it's a nonmainstream story about a nonmainstream subject, when ideally, it should simply be a story about a person. The picture too often feels like a lesson in tolerance.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Huffman intermittently rescues Transamerica from bathos with her brusque wit, swatting away the victimization elements that figure into most films about transsexuals.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Like a preoperative transsexual, Transamerica is neither one thing nor the other. It yanks at the heartstrings too much to qualify as an edgy comedy-drama, but it's far too bawdy to make it to the Hallmark Channel.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

By the way, the other thing that keeps Transamerica from being a mainstream movie is its obsession with penises: showing them, talking about them, placing us in bathrooms and trailers when they're in use.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Writer-director Duncan Tucker does little to develop his narrative setup beyond the basic and obvious, and his film begins to feel more like an exercise than a fully realized story.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

At its best, Transamerica made me laugh and feel for Bree. At its worst, it made me cringe at the potential creepiness of its central relationship.