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88The result, bolstered by strong acting and an intriguing back story, is an unqualified success. Love and Other Drugs may be the most honest romance to grace the screens during all of 2010.
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80A love story that is actually worth falling for, with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal excellent at steaming up the screen in Love & Other Drugs.
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75As is appropriate in a well-crafted and meticulous movie, the acting is strong down the line.
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75Two very good looking people play two offbeat and abrasively charming lovers in Love & Other Drugs. And when your screen romance is as sexual as this one, it helps if your stars are about as good looking with their clothes off as human beings get.
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70In the end, this is a smart movie that could have been smarter. The script feels like it was a draft or so away from total clarity and focus. But the energy of the cast and a dive into an unfamiliar world make the movie rather addictive.
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70It honestly shouldn't work at all, yet somehow on the strength of good humor and sex appeal ends up being one of the most enjoyable mainstream films of the season.
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70A sometimes intoxicating, sometimes headache-inducing cocktail: a sweet, libidinous love story; a candid comedy of bedroom and workplace manners; and, most bravely, if also most jarringly, a medical melodrama involving a chronic and very serious disease.
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70Love and Other Drugs has many weak spots, but what it delivers at its core is as indelible as (and a lot more explicit than) the work of such legendary teams as Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
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67They could have made a harder-hitting, more realistic film, but then no one would have gone to see it.
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67When Gyllenhaal stops selling out, the movie starts.
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67Love & Other Drugs is a slick weepie made by smart guys who want you to know they're better than the schlockmeisters. They've outsmarted themselves.
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65As potentially appealing as these two actors might be, there's just nowhere for this story to go.
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63Zwick's "Once and Again" and "Thirtysomething" portrayed emotion more honestly than many TV shows of their time. But in Love and Other Drugs, he unevenly weds the satirical and the sentimental.
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63There's no adroitness, no grace in the handling of the pitching emotions - funny, sad, icky - that such a story presents.
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63Love & Other Drugs is quite the little cocktail of mood-brighteners, a movie narcotic easy to take and, since the effects wear off quickly, even easier to forget.
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63Successful in small doses, but the full regimen needed more testing.
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63The director is Edward Zwick, a considerable filmmaker. He obtains a warm, lovable performance from Anne Hathaway and dimensions from Gyllenhaal that grow from comedy to the serious.
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63Doesn't quite avoid the pitfalls of its genre, but at least the movie has the decency to make you laugh on its way to a foregone conclusion. Also, did I mention the sex?
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63If product proves especially difficult to swallow, take with a grain of salt and three or more alcoholic drinks, or wait until such time as active ingredients Hathaway and Gyllenhaal have been more effectively utilized elsewhere.
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60The film definitely gets it up, but has some commitment issues.
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60Careening from bathos to bromance to naked sexytime, the movie is like a mashup of three or four different movies, at least two of them fairly unpleasant. And yet Love and Other Drugs is so sincere and unjaded about its mystifying purpose that it keeps our gaze fixed on the screen for the full two hours.
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60We never really forget we're watching two highly paid professionals create a cinematic placebo, strong enough to entertain without making a long-term impact. Fortunately, everyone works just hard enough to sell us on the whole thing anyway.
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60Well above the standards of your average romantic comedy, it's funny, sexy and smart. It's just not smart enough to stick to its guns to the end.
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60Zwick can't seem to decide what the movie is - a refreshingly frank comedy about sex and commitment, or a more-serious look at illness and its effect on relationships.
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58An old-fashioned romance-and-sickness picture, a publicity-grabbing sex picture, an Apatow-lite horny-boys picture, and a liberal satire on pharmaceutical-industry excesses committed in pursuit of pill sales - all in one.
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50While Hathaway and Gyllenhaal have good chemistry, and director Edward Zwick moves the narrative along nicely, the film is too self-satisfied to be genuinely touching.
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50A jagged little pill that, in the end, goes down too smoothly.
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50Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal are hotties with talent. And they maneuver through the daunting maze of shifting tones and intersecting plots of Love and Other Drugs like the pros they are.
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50You can't fault the theme that life's darkest moments brighten when two people need each other, but there's no drug strong enough to get me through another movie like Love and Other Drugs.
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50They put the "obvious" in "obvious."
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50Gyllenhaal and Hathaway exert considerable powers of hangdog charm and fierce independence, trying to give firm shape to the saggy script. But if you want to watch these two struggle through an up-and-down screen relationship, rent "Brokeback Mountain."
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50The movie never strikes a balance between its comic and dramatic halves and that dooms it. It is an almost good film that flounders, because there is no treatment for tone deafness.
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50I suppose when you make a movie, however tangentially, about Viagra, you're required to insert at least one scene of its side effects, but the broadness with which Zwick plays it out is like a stake to the heart of the film's hard-earned but fast-lost authenticity.
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40Love & Other Drugs is crazily uneven, jumping back and forth between jerk-off jokes and Parkinson's sufferers sharing their stories of hope. It's the sort of movie in which half the audience will be drying their eyes and the other half rolling them.
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38A jagged little pill of a movie from baby boomer avatar Edward Zwick.
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38Porno plus Parkinson's don't quite add up to sexy fun.
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30A watered-down satire of the pharmaceutical industry.
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Dec 13, 201020Buried somewhere in Zwick's film might be a topical modern romance, maybe even a health care satire, but you'd need to dig past layers of creative desperation to find it.