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100The story's outline may be familiar, but its emphasis and quality are not.
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83The film's got one of the cleverest, and most satisfying ambiguous endings of any film all year.
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78Berger’s low-key, likable ensemble film flares with brilliance in its framing concept.
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Apr 17, 201375The movie’s funniest touches are quiet flashes of character, expertly timed and nimbly played by a deft ensemble. It’s a Disaster is consistently funny, but you wince more often than you laugh out loud. It’s like a Christopher Guest improvisational farce with the volume turned down to 5.
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75Cross may not earn the broad recognition he deserves for his performance in It's a Disaster, a droll apocalypse comedy of exceedingly modest scale and even more modest commercial appeal. But it's still a master class in how to play the straight man right.
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75It’s A Disaster is lively and assured before a third-act twist takes the film in an even more bracingly bleak direction. The twist is one tonal shift too many, but the film otherwise manages to find the levity, as well as the pathos, in the prospect of total annihilation.
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75Writer-director Todd Berger, improving his technique with his second feature-length credit following "The Scenesters," combines enough energetic performances with charged wit to make this one doomsday comedy that earns the right to its familiar backdrop.
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70The script excels at character-driven laughs, cerebral yet goofy, without resorting to sitcom stereotypes or genitalia-focused stupidity.
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70Audiences may not care about this gang when the party starts, but once the dust settles, you’ve gotta admit, they made for pretty good company.
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63The humour may not be wickedly black, but once in a while it’s amusingly beige.
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60Quirky, funny and a little claustrophobic (by design), it’s confident enough in what it’s trying to accomplish to take the chance on the title. And what he’s trying to accomplish is ambitious.
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60The movie elicits knowing smiles more than laughs, even as it reveals a boundless observational awareness about the beefs and slights that, for the small-minded, must feel like everyday Armageddons.
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Apr 5, 201350The film flirts with big ideas about adult relationships, but fails to locate any gravitas about its characters' existential or psychological crises.
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40Berger’s got some clever ideas, but he does not push far in exploring them. And aside from Cross, there is virtually no one to like among these self-involved suburbanites. After an hour alone with them, we can’t help wishing The End would just arrive.
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30The movie lurches from the improbably silly to the drearily so, while the characters remain so emotionally and psychologically divorced from life that they might as well be zombies or sitcom stick figures.
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25As far as I’m concerned, death couldn’t arrive quickly enough for these eight stereotypically self-absorbed Los Angelenos gathered for Sunday brunch at which the hosts (Blaise Miller, Erinn Hayes) plan to announce the demise of their marriage.
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20Berger’s script is little more than a series of contrived comic vignettes that prevent the actors from creating believable characters, forcing them to contort to fit the low-rent farce.