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100A dulcetly crazy, certifiably hilarious and eerily mysterious little comedy.
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91Cyrus cues us to expect it to go over the top, but the film never does. That may be its neatest trick
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90Amuses and unnerves in equal measure. A comedy of discomfort that walks a wonderful line between reality-based emotional honesty and engaging humor, it demonstrates the good things that happen when quirky independent style combines with top-of-the-line acting skill.
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88Cyrus, the summer's best, most original and crazily inventive comedy, is potently funny and painfully real.
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88Here is a film that uses very good actors and gives them a lot of improvisational freedom to talk their way into, around and out of social discomfort. And it's not snarky. It doesn't mock these characters. It understand they have their difficulties and hopes they find a way to work things out.
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88Amuses and unnerves in equal measure.
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88Middle-aged romance can be a dicey prospect. And it gets more complicated when children are in the picture. But it gets more complex still if the "child" is actually 21, and creepily meddlesome.
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88Cyrus is affecting, but not in a clean, easily recognizable way. It is funny, but in a warped manner more likely to provoke unease than unbridled laughter.
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83How pleasant to report, then, that a new romantic comedy -- small, smart, funny, tender and dear -- should emerge from a pair of filmmaking brothers still in their 30s and with a distinct indie film pedigree that informs, while not dominating, their work.
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83There's no way to make this a feel-good movie, and admirably the Duplass brothers don't try. Cyrus finds its humor in dark places, through characters bringing out the worst in each other.
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83There's an original comic temperament at work here, and that's rare.
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80The filmmakers -- mumblecore moguls, if such a thing can be said to exist -- prefer a squirmy kind of comedy that's all about the awkward situations real people find themselves in. And with these performers, the vibe stays down-to-earth and almost entirely unpredictable.
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80The comedy of discomfort that runs through Cyrus is often about several things at once. But the most prevalent emotion in this quirky yet genuine movie is the awkwardness that comes with trying to fit into someone else's life.
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80The Duplass brothers enter the mainstream with a touching, original and supremely funny film, whose improvisational style sets it apart from other comedies, and marks the emergence of two major new talents. Great performances, too.
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80Although Jonah Hill has been sweetly, profanely funny in such films as "Superbad" and "Get Him to the Greek," in Cyrus he's a revelation.
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80Neither Reilly nor Tomei have ever seemed so effortlessly funny, and whoever thought to cast one of Judd Apatow's regulars as a dysfunctional, disturbed manchild should be dubbed a genius.
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80An enjoyably off-kilter romantic comedy with a touch of madcap farce and just a hint of darkness.
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80A freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them.
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80The scariest romantic comedy of the year.
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80As the furiously passive-aggressive title character, Jonah Hill delivers a craftier comic performance than anything in his box-office hits (Superbad, Get Him to the Greek), but what really elevates the story above its shticky premise is the combined neuroses of all three characters.
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75Hill cuts a hilariously adversarial figure.
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75It's a shrewd, poignant drama disguised as a comedy.
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75John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill give such wonderfully satisfying, full-blooded performances in Cyrus that it seems almost churlish to wish this creepy little Oedipal comedy were a little more well-thought-out, and handled its wilder shifts in tone with more finesse.
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75Don't be fooled by the casual style. There is nothing casual about these emotions, or about the talent of these two filmmakers.
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75Even at its most troubling, Cyrus is powered by a deep vein of humanism, one that offers hope to even the weirdest among us.
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75The combination of a flexible, funny cast, an amusing situation and a style of movie-making that embraces every happy, nasty accident make this if not the funniest, then certainly the most uncomfortable comedy of the summer.
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75Like the recent "Greenberg," Cyrus is not the jokey, polished production you would expect from its Hollywood cast and LA setting, but audiences who are comfortable with discomfort should find it "funny."
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70Think of Cyrus as the Duplasses for the masses, as the keenly observant sibs upgrade their scrappy, relationship-based formula to work with movie stars and a Fox Searchlight-size budget without sacrificing the raw, naturalistic feel of their first two features, "The Puffy Chair" and "Baghead."
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67Cyrus is very funny, and Keener's supporting work as John's divorced ex also amuses. A pat conclusion nevertheless negates the strength of the restive narrative that precedes it.
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Insightful but ultimately ponderous entertainment.
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60Cyrus is more finely tuned than their earlier movies ("The Puffy Chair," "Baghead"), but it shares a similar, almost aggressive lack of ambition. John doesn't work hard and neither do the Duplasses, who don't want their audiences to break a sweat either. That's too bad, because Cyrus is more interesting and fun when you're recoiling at the effrontery of its comedy and not its conventionality.
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60Mining the incest prohibition for laughs in what's essentially a light romantic comedy is a bold move, and for the first two-thirds of the movie, it works surprisingly well. But as long as the Duplasses are willing to go there, I can't help but wish they'd gone a little further.
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50At the very least, Cyrus forces one of these man-children to face a younger version of himself, and find a grown-up compromise.
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50The emotional geometry is familiar enough to be credible yet odd enough to be creepy.
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50Those unfamiliar with the Duplass' previous movies won't realize what's missing; they'll just enjoy the earthy angst, edgy laughs and off-kilter casting of Jonah Hill.
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50The Duplasses' sensitivity, which is genuine, yields too much tepid relationship-speak, and Marisa Tomei, one of the most appealing actresses in Hollywood, is left with little to play.
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50Once again with the Duplasses, there just isn't enough of anything: not enough funny lines, not enough variation of mood, not enough plot. If these guys were students, Cyrus might merit a "promising." But this is their third movie. It's time for them to stop turning in first drafts.
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25It still has a long way to go before the term Mumblecore (which sounds like a Harry Potter major at Hogwart's) can be confused with the term Class Act.