Metascore

Generally favorable reviews - based on 19 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 6 Ratings

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 18 out of 19
  2. Negative: 0 out of 19
  1. Hurt gives an astonishingly sensitive and funny performance as the bedazzled intellectual, and first-time filmmaker Kwietniowski unfolds the story with an unfailing blend of humor and compassion.
  2. Reviewed by: David Ansen
    80
    The first-time writer-director, Englishman Richard Kwietniowski, has adapted Gilbert Adair's novel with wit, economy and a delicate understanding that the funniest comedies are played with dead seriousness.
  3. John Hurt is simply wonderful -- acerbic, funny and heartbreaking.
  4. 60
    The interactions between the raspy-voiced Hurt and various shallowly cheerful Americans are genuinely charming and dynamic.

See all 19 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 2
  2. Negative: 1 out of 2
  1. JayH.
    4
    What a nasty unpleasant film. I am usually not this far off from the critics. I found it boring and useless. Go figure. John Hurt was good, but the film was so pretentious and uninvolving. Yuk. Expand
  2. JaredC.
    2
    Terribly corny and awfully precedented. Avoid at all costs.