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90Sexy, funny, sad and defiantly romantic, Feast of Love is the rare movie to cuddle up to.
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75The multiple-story-line family drama is too cliche-ridden to be considered a great movie. But it's still a very good one, filled with excellent performances, entertaining writing and a final few scenes that are quite moving - even if you can see most of them coming at the end of the first act.
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75Many of the script's observations sound as though they were lifted directly from the pages of Baxter's book, and they're too platitudinous to impart much wisdom to anyone who's been in and out of love at least once in his or her life. But it's nice to see these ideas played out by a fine cast.
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75Feast of Love's greatest strength is that it's about people and involves universal emotions. It's not great art but it is enjoyable soap opera.
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70The film, with its intersecting vignettes, might ultimately feel like more of a sampler platter than a sustaining smorgasbord, but it's effectively rooted in a lovely Morgan Freeman performance.
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70Septuagenarian director Robert Benton brings his characteristically fine touch with actors and appreciation for the female form to this tastefully erotic ensembler, but compassion finally outstrips insight in a drama as soft-headed as it is soft-hearted.
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70This heart-warmer by Robert Benton has some of the tender wisdom and humor of his other features (e.g., Nobody's Fool).
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67Feast is set and was shot in Portland, and if nothing else it makes the case that we live in one gorgeous city.
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67Most of the love in Feast of Love is unrequited, untapped, or unfulfilled. The fine cast, which includes Jane Alexander, Selma Blair, and Radha Mitchell, is also somewhat underused.
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63You'll find more authenticity listening in on conversations at your corner diner. But this is a gentler alternative, especially if you prefer your coffee with extra cream and sugar anyway.
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63As a meditation on the vicissitudes of love, on the need for people to connect, and the struggles that come by both making and missing those connections, the movie is wading-pool deep.
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63The story teeters on the edge of soap opera and emotional manipulation, but director Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer) pulls back in the nick of time. What results is an involving and often poignant examination of love and loss.
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63The bodies are athletic, young, and white, and yet this is not the sport sex we usually see in Hollywood movies. It's the sex of adulation. Sometimes the director Robert Benton goes heavy on the hydraulic positioning, but his movie is scarcely mechanical.
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58Amounts to little more than high-class soap opera.
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58Maybe Benton's serenely dull time-waster should take a cue from one of its main settings, and become the first Hollywood film released directly to coffee shops. Otherwise, it seems destined to find an indulgent second home as an unusually classy slot-plugger over at Lifetime.
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50Benton has made better movies, but this one has no organic reality.
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50Robert Benton's recent films have been vexing combinations of gentility and stiffness, and despite a fair bit of nudity "Feast of Love" behaves itself all too well. It's as neat as a pin; it ties up every loose end in careful "Playhouse 90" style. Despite some awfully smart actors, Benton's movie made me long for a few interrupted sentences and the occasionally conflicted character.
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50Mostly due to luminous writing, Baxter's novel evoked a sense of magic, but this Feast, though never completely uninteresting, leaves you hungry for enchantment.
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50The movie begins to feel more like a buffet of contrivance than a feast of love.
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50Any of the key relationships would have been grist enough for one movie's mill, but "Feast" crams them all together.
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50Far too cloyingly pleased with its own humanity.
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50The final half-hour is like the not-so-grand finale for a silly-sticky sitcom. It's a college-town "Friends" with an unearned doctorate.
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For a film that purports to be an epic consideration of Love in Our Time, Feast is strikingly unthoughtful and uninterested in any but the most obvious kind of romantic love.
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40There are warm, genuine moments that endear these attractive characters and their experiences to us despite all the falderal. Feast of Love may be enough for some to keep the pangs at bay 'til the real thing comes along.
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40A more accurate name for Feast of Love might be "Feast of Breasts." At every opportunity, Mr. Benton turns the camera on his actresses' gleaming torsos. These beautifully lighted soft-core teases lend an erotic frisson to a movie that in most other ways feels enervated.
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40What passes for the movie's reality is interlocking episodes of ersatz ecstasy and angst -- a Cupid-governed "Crash" -- plus snippets of wisdom dispensed by Mr. Freeman's character.
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25You can see better stuff on TV any night of the week.
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20Love is a many-splendored thing in Robert Benton's dull romantic fantasy Feast of Love, though none of its splendors rings true.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 5 out of 7
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Mixed: 2 out of 7
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Negative: 0 out of 7
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GerardZ.4Unrealistic and gratuitous but you cannot help but enjoy Morgan Freeman. Also, there are no Deans of Philosophy.
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TomM.8
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Rebecca10