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80Subtlety and nuance mark both the film's dialogue and performances. It's hard to see how Dancy and Byrne could be any better.
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75The beautifully crafted Adam offers no pat or easy answers.
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It's the speed of love, not the speed of light, that occupies Adam, a small, sweet movie about one man's widening cosmos.
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75The tendency for an actor in a role like this is to overact. The result is often disastrous, reducing a character into a caricature. Hugh Dancy, adopting an American accent as effectively as the mannerisms of someone on the moderate portion of the Asperger's spectrum, makes Adam believable and generally sympathetic.
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75It may not be original, but Adam could leave a lump in your throat.
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75When it's not lapsing into disease-of-the-week prose, Adam presents a credible account of the challenges inherent in this misunderstood and often-ridiculed condition.
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70A sensitive but not sentimental story about a romance involving a mentally challenged young man never makes a misstep.
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70The humor is delicate, and the performances sweet and sure; the script (by the director, Max Mayer) is not entirely predictable, and the Manhattan locations (lovingly photographed by Seamus Tierney) have a starry-eyed glaze.
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70Emotionally potent performances, gently offbeat humor and writer-helmer Max Mayer's assured touch guide this tender New York love story to a quietly hopeful conclusion.
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At its best, Adam makes the viewer understand the frustration of living in a world in which everyone is a stranger -- not least by making us work as hard to understand its hero's feelings as Adam himself must work to understand Beth's.
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67It's hard to buy this relationship even for a moment. Adam is sweet, meticulous, and, at times, sort of clever, but it's also a not-quite-surprising-enough heartwarming trifle.
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63Adam wraps up their story in too tidy a package, insisting on finding the upbeat in the murky, and missing the chance to be more thoughtful about this challenging situation.
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63The most daring thing about Adam, the story of a young man with Asperger's syndrome, is that there isn't a scene in which someone stops to explain exactly what Asperger's IS.
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63It can be argued that Adam uses Asperger's as a kind of metaphor for the barriers that people erect to fend off strangers, to guard against intimacy. It can also be argued that writer/director Mayer is shamelessly manipulative.
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63Adam is a cut above most romances and boasts a intriguing conclusion. One comes away with a sense of hope, leavened by realism.
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63The climax and epilogue are the juiciest, most tough-minded bits in the movie. Too bad Mayer didn't work his way backward from the end.
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60A very superficial look at what it may be like trying to romance someone on the autistic scale.
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60Adam succeeds at getting inside its hero's mind and, more impressively still, gives us entrée to his singular soul.
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58Dancy's character has difficulty processing information and dealing with emotion, but even he could probably see through this schmaltz.
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50Is a man with Asperger's boyfriend material? It's difficult to determine how we wind up here, but it's strange that a movie ostensibly about a man and his lack of social options left me depressed about a woman and hers.
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50Were it not for the fine engaging performances of both Dancy and Byrne, Adam would be sickly sweet.
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50As well-intended as it is, writer-director Max Mayer's film lacks focus.
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50Beyond that educational element and the delicate performances of Dancy and Byrne, I found Adam dramatically limp, predictable and in a curious way even retrograde.
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Other than Rose Byrne's on-screen radiance and a soothingly warm palette lit by cinematographer Seamus Tierney, there's not much to get passionate about in this amiable chamberpiece from theater director Max Mayer.
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As predictable as the alphabet but should hold particular appeal to women whose maternal impulses inflect their mating instincts.
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40I find nearly every film about mentally challenged characters excruciating to watch...None of these movies ever come close to accurately depicting what it's like to live with mental challenges.
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30This is the kind of movie in which every other line of dialogue feels like a metaphor – and from there on, the film seesaws between the uncomfortable extremes of glum and twee: an overwrought dirge keyed to a xylophonic ping.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 14
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Mixed: 1 out of 14
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Negative: 0 out of 14
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SheilaM10Charming, thought-provoking and delightful.
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MichaelN10
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