Venus

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Told with wit, genuine poignancy and all kinds of humor, Venus charts the unlikely relationship between a man in his 70s and a young woman more than half a century his junior.

New York Post Kyle Smith

A sublime meditation that is one of this year's wisest, warmest and funniest films.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Venus is a magnificent tribute to actors by filmmakers who know they are the essential human material of theater and the screen.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

A man can be a treasure just as a work of art can be, and O'Toole is one of the handful of living film actors worthy of a museum of his own. Venus would make a brilliant final exhibit.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Venus may be a leering male fantasy, but it is also, improbably but persuasively, a love story as tender as it is transgressive. It's a wry celebration of the tyranny of beauty, and the tragicomic way in which desire outruns the betrayals of dying flesh.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Venus belongs to O'Toole. This is, hands down, my favorite performance of the year, largely because I love the way O'Toole (and the filmmakers) refuse to yield to the all-too-pervasive idea that it's "icky" for old people to even think about sex.

Newsweek David Ansen

A heartbreaking comedy that is simultaneously funny and sad, raunchy and sweet, funky and elegiac. These fresh, unexpected juxtapositions are a specialty of the writer Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"), a sworn enemy of cliché.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

The quiet respect Venus displays toward lions in winter, defanged though they may be, is rare enough; the film's respect for unfinessed lionesses-to-be is rarer still. Wherever they're going, no one here is going quietly.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Venus is rollickingly funny at times -- but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

The great thing about Venus - apart from its sharp eye for the daily routines and drab details of senior citizenry in a buzzing metropolis - is that it isn't soppy, or sentimental.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Peter O'Toole, looking frail beyond his 74 years, gives what may be his farewell performance as a leading movie actor in Roger Michell's Venus. It's one for the books - and maybe the Oscars, too.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Peter O'Toole, still a British cinematic lion at 74, performs another movie miracle in the Roger Michell-Hanif Kureishi film Venus.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The screenplay is by Hanif Kureishi, who wrote "The Mother" for Michell and also scripted the classic "My Beautiful Laundrette." He has a feeling for outsiders.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray

O'Toole is frail and probably won't make many more movies. So Venus is pitched partly as a fond farewell to a beloved artist, and his whole beautiful generation.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Venus is the second film from director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi to explore the sexual lives of folk that the movies treat as sexless -- the elderly. But where "The Mother" was a cold film of sexual greed and emotional pettiness, this robust yet delicate comic drama finds a kind of dignity in the old lothario whose vital life force struggles against a failing body.

Empire Alan Morrison

A screen-acting showcase by a man whose best days, many thought, were behind him. There's life in the old dog yet.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

The amazing thing about Venus is that it's brutally honest about all this but at the same time funny as hell.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Awash in terrific performances.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Since the movie is about desire -- not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide -- it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi's knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination.

Village Voice Jim Ridley

Maurice, the protagonist of Venus, is a suit lovingly tailored to O'Toole's ravaged but commanding frame.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi take a deeper, edifying interest in the moral ambiguities that arise between Maurice and Jessie. And thanks to our warm investment in both characters, we're more than willing to sign up for this existential ride. We allow this relationship -- and the movie -- to take us places we'd never usually go.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

This comedy drama is an exercise in self-indulgence for O'Toole, but an enjoyable and touching one.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

The suggestion that Peter O'Toole is playing some version of his real self in Venus adds a bittersweet poignancy to this quietly affecting British drama.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Like similar English comedies, it also teeters on the mawkish.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Though O'Toole, whose ruined beauty Michell emphasizes in frequent and tight close-ups, and newcomer Whittaker have a striking rapport, the film's most haunting moments pair him with Vanessa Redgrave -- amazingly, this is their first movie together -- as his ex-wife. They evoke a lifetime of love, betrayal, regret and forgiveness in the space of a few lines, then move on without missing a beat.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

This is a brave movie because it addresses a subject Hollywood feels uncomfortable about.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

O'Toole gives a staggering performance -- fearless, defiantly untamed and in its own way a work of art.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Peter O'Toole's tour-de-force performance makes Venus a movie not to be missed.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Melancholy but enjoyable.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns, breezily enjoyable throughout.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Venus is worth seeing for the scenes between O’Toole and Vanessa Redgrave as the woman he abandoned--the mother of his children.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Venus has a swank pedigree, but in this case that doesn't mean it's much more than a quaint machine to elicit tears and awards.