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100A brash romantic comedy that has a serious purpose at its core.
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100Smart, funny and often viciously cruel, this is a romantic comedy for people who are too old to believe in fairyales but wise enough to accept a happy ending when that's what life gives them.
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90In As Good as It Gets, his (Brooks) mastery of the nuances of language and emotion has turned the most unlikely material into the best and funniest romantic comedy of the year.
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90What Brooks manages to do with them as they struggle mightily to connect with one another is funny, painful, beautiful, and basically truthful--a triumph for everyone involved.
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90Nicholson is near-perfect as he slowly allows callous cruelty to give way to vulnerability in one of the most original, idiosynchratic roles of the year.
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88It's a case of actors and strong writing coming together, and it's uncommon in contemporary movies.
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88Nicholson, Hunt, and Kinnear will win you over as they turn the film into a valentine to New York's walking wounded.
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80As funny as it's got all year. Manipulative and calculating? Sure. Submit! Enjoy!
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It all adds up to a compelling, deftly executed film that thoughtfully examines the actions and motivations that draw people together, directing their uneasy relationships.
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80Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, the film not only gets up on wobbly legs but learns to dance by the closing credits.
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75There's so much good here, in the dialogue, the performances and the observation, that the movie succeeds at many moments even while pursuing its doomed grand design.
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The movie often verges on being too much; Brooks' supreme balancing act is to keep it all under control.
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75Not a positive triumph, but it does bring a smile to the face and, perhaps in some cases, a tear to the eye.
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75The result takes the audience on a screwball odyssey that mixes engaging twists with off-putting turns -- often fun, always watchable, but never quite as good as it could be.
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75You'll laugh and cry at the film, but you'll bridle, too, at Brooks' clumsy technique.
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70Appreciate it instead as an exceedingly well-crafted fairy tale, alive with eccentric, overdrawn Dickensian characters and irresistibly wholehearted sentiment, and you'll enjoy perhaps the most accomplished and satisfying work of Brooks' career as a middlebrow entertainer.
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70Even as you question the central premise, Brooks makes you want to buy into it.
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70It may be a very good, very Brooksian sitcom, but it's accomplished entirely with the broad strokes and resolutely flat surfaces of television.
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67A cute premise that, upon closer inspection, rings falser rather than truer. It's pretty good, but not nearly as good as Brooks gets.
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60Billed cleverly as a comedy from the heart that goes for the throat. If only Brooks had had the guts to avoid the schmaltz.
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Wicked, but it works.
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60As Good as It Gets works: by the end you'll no doubt be won over by its cranky hero. But for those of us who cherish the quirkily unformulaic Brooks of old, it's a tainted victory.
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60A sporadically funny romantic comedy with all the dramatic plausibility and tonal consistency of a TV variety show.
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50Nicholson's over-the-top acting gives an entertaining edge to the plot's feel-good manipulations.
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The material has no dramatic center, a problem pointed up by Brooks' failed solution to it -- his use of an ugly-cute little dog, Simon's pet.
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50An overstatement. The movie's too long, and the direction is sometimes slack -- but the script is crammed with withering ripostes, ably delivered by Nicholson and Hunt.
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50Gets bogged down in sentimentality, while its wheels spin futilely in life-solving overdrive.
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50Nicholson, one of the best actors in American screen history, is miscast again… He is quite visibly uncomfortable in his role. It needed an actor who could easily be viciously stuffy, like William Hurt. Nicholson struggles for the core of the man but never gets it. [Feb. 2, 1998]
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40In between all the laughs and tears, it becomes painfully obvious that there's not a whole lot of story here to prop up the constant emotional yanking.
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Experiencing this movie is a little like watching a manic-depressive's medication wear off.
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Positive: 12 out of 13
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Mixed: 1 out of 13
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Negative: 0 out of 13
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MelS.10This my favorite movie. Phenomenal actors portraying how hard it is, and how worth it is, to change.