- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
75No better or worse than the movies that inspired it, but that is a compliment, I think.
-
75Light, funny, and clever.
-
75Could have used more of the shimmering elegance of the Day-Hudson comedies. Those movies had a true sparkle. This one's a likable piece of costume jewelry.
-
50The film is juvenile when it should be adult, coarse when it ought to be bubbly, and upfront when witty circumspection is indicated. The result feels a bit like a drag show, a camp blend of pitch-perfect mimicry and anachronistic raunch.
-
50What starts as freshly spun cotton candy ends as something pink, sticky and indigestible. You leave the theater wanting to puke it up.
-
100A very smart, very shrewd movie, and the smartest, shrewdest thing about it is the way it masquerades as just a fluffy comedy, a diversion, a trifle.
-
25A total lack of chemistry between the stars -- neither of whom is particularly good at romantic comedy in the first place -- and you have a promising package that grows steadily less lovable as it goes along. Down with this movie!
-
75This is all far beyond silly, of course - the most inconsequential sort of winking, meta-movie in-joke.
-
40Jeff Cronenweth did the lovely cinematography. It's the only element that improves on the original material.
-
63Dragging on too long is a more serious flaw in a romantic comedy than it might be in a complex drama. We don't ask much of a movie like this, but we do require it to be snappy, clever and quick.
-
40You can't set the comedy bar much lower than spoofing the old Rock Hudson-Doris Day romances.
-
75Doesn't so much crackle as pop. It has enough double entendres to fill a D-cup, but it has a premise that would have burned a hole in the screen in 1962, when its story is set.
-
25The plot's as thin as a debutante's cigarette case.
-
83it's so much fun because, like Haynes' film, it's made by people with a genuine love for the entertainment they're bringing back to life. You'd have to be a real prude not to go for it.
-
88A postfeminist valentine to the Paleolithic days of Woman Power when dinosaurs walked Manhattan in heels with matching handbags.
-
50An irritation, more fizzle than sizzle.
-
58Zellweger is a gifted comedienne and her wonky persona sparks here and there, but the humor is so broad that the film is a poor stage for her subtle comedic skills, and she's not photographed well: her face has to be lit just so or it tends to looks strangely distorted. McGregor is terrible casting.
-
38The film is hapless. The gap between the moviemakers' ambition and their wit is dizzying. It's as if they thought they were filming The Importance of Being Unimportant.
-
50The fatal flaw of Down With Love... is that in mining what's kitschily amusing about those movies, it also re-creates far too faithfully everything that's unbearable about them.
-
80May register most immediately as a snappy whirl of visual gags, double entendres, overheated romance, and comically oversized living quarters, but beneath the exuberance of this fond counterfeit is a heartbeat as powerful as that of any film anchored in the present.
-
60It's like a "Saturday Night Live" sketch on a $60 million budget.
-
30The parodistic romantic comedy makes the fatal mistake of so much middlebrow satire: It becomes that which it mocks.
-
50The new film is conflicted about its subject -- it both derides and adores what it means to parody -- and it's miscast at the top. Still, the Eve Ahlert -- Dennis Drake script has a gentle heart to humanize its sharp sitcom wit.
-
70Works hard to earn it and is, for the most part, intelligent and amusing, even if it never achieves the full-tilt zany desperation of Delbert Mann's "Lover Come Back," the best of the real Hudson-Day movies.
-
50The chief casualties are the good actors, who are forced to turn themselves into cartoons.
-
38Explicitly invites us to mock its artificiality and giggly cluelessness, but beyond its attractive shell the film rings hollow. These days, even a comedy has got to have a heart.
-
89Sexy, sophisticated comedy that only occasionally falls short of its admirable ambition: that is, to be a fun, fizzy, razzle-dazzle thing. Straight to the moon, indeed.
-
60Both of them (Zellweger and McGregor) are set adrift by the movie's discomforting demands, and only in the closing credits (this really is a top-and-tail movie) do they get to do what people do most fruitfully instead of sex, which is to make a song and dance about it. Who needs love? [26 May 2003, p. 102]
-
40It’s all strenuously camp.
-
63The problem lies with the paucity of sizzle between the romantic leads, Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor. They just don't look like they're having any fun together, particularly the bony Zellweger, who has trouble filling out the wow-worthy ensembles and perpetually looks like she's sucking on a lemon.