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75Branagh and Love's Labour's Lost all but will themselves into liftoff. They achieve it, and in doing so, they somehow make it right to our pleasure centers with their generous embrace of stardust and pizazz.
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68A trifle of a farce fashioned into a '30s musical that gaily trips as much as it lightly skips, but nonetheless marks a welcome return to form.
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67The effect is weird but it, actually, kind of works, illuminating both Shakespeare and the artifice of musicals.
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63There's not a song I wouldn't hear again with pleasure, or a clip that might not make me smile, but as a whole, it's not much. Like cotton candy, it's better as a concept than as an experience.
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63The leaden bits do bring the proceedings to a screeching halt too many times, but the costumes are breathtaking, and the details (like color-coordinated martinis) are dazzling.
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63Branagh's attempt to meld Shakespeare's densely verbal early comedy with Broadway show tunes fails, thanks to stunt casting, poor singing and dancing, and the incompatibility of the two art forms.
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63The writer-director has come up with a sumptuous, happy piece of fluff.
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60Even though Love's Labour's Lost is, in showbiz terms, a turkey stuffed with chestnuts, you wouldn't trade it for a pot of gold.
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58Too many moments of evident labor weigh this clever production down. To quote the playwright: ''Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.''
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58It's never hugely engaging and it's instantly forgettable, but it has a certain goofy charm.
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Filling his movie with bright colors and giddy energy, Branagh has made a labor of love in which the labor is all too apparent.
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50It's all very colorful, but the movie's diverse elements clash as often as they cooperate.
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50Has its moments of charm, but it's ultimately a fascinating failure that surely looked better on paper than it does on the screen.
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50Even at its best, the movie plays like a clip reel.
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50Love's Labour's Lost is flawed, but Kenneth Branagh remains our greatest living interpreter of Shakespeare.
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50Labour teeters on the edge of the amateur. Yet it's hard not to root for its moonstruck spirit, or to succumb to the panache of the pastiche.
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40As if to prove that light romantic comedy can be just as difficult to stage as Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh fails at both, simultaneously.
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40Branagh's take on the play comes right up to the edge of disaster but stubbornly refuses to leap in.
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30Branagh has cut, pasted and aggressively abridged Love's Labour's Lost, and piled it high with fancy visuals to make sure we get the drift.
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30Taken as a whole, the movie seems to be searching for a harmony it never really achieves.
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30But this is a sloppy job, both in little goofs...and in the cast's gung-ho amateurism. It's like Shakespeare done by the "Fame" kids.
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25A stink bomb of a movie.
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20Hamming shamelessly as Berowne, Branagh is overseasoned for his part ... he's as desperate as a veteran social director at a Catskills hotel about to fold.
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20These are good people, yet the director has them carrying on like community theater actors playing to the balcony. It isn't fair to them, and it isn't fitting for Shakespeare.
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20It ought to be delightful, but it isn't.
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16An atrocity exhibition from start to finish.
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10Unfathomably awful.
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10KEN, KEN, KEN, not another Shakespeare, pleeeeeeez.
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10Misguided version of one of the Bard's best comedies.