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90A triumph of quiet realism, a piece of sophisticated, subtle filmmaking that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking.
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88Bardem plays the part with all the pent-up animal rage of a young Robert De Niro.
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88There's a dignity to Mondays in the Sun that manages to keep the film buoyant, helping to keep all the despair at bay.
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83The performances are relaxed. The open-ended, vignette-like structure of the filmmaking sometimes imitates the movement of weary, life-worn men nursing liquor.
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80A tough-but-tender movie driven by perfectly modulated performances, an accomplished script and naturalistic dialogue, all at the service of an oft-told message about overcoming circumstances.
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80To the patient viewer, the rewards are many, especially Bardem's performance.
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78Bardem injects a shaggy, compassionate humor throughout, aided by a wry and moving ensemble cast and co-writer/director Fernando León de Aranda's eye for the offbeat.
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The tired and washed-out Spanish town is a fitting backdrop for these men - a place where life moves on around them at an uninspiring pace.
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75The story's rambling, meandering style is just right for the melancholy subject being explored, and all the acting is excellent.
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75There's also enough laconic humor, warming camaraderie and hopeful stabs at dignity to keep the story from assuming the glum gunmetal gray of its setting on the coast of northwestern Spain.
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75By turns wry, rueful and explosively funny.
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75A quintessentially European, methodically paced and intelligent slice of life.
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75Loach makes a working metaphor of the old ant-and-grasshopper story, but the film's images are what echo the loudest.
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70Imagine "The Full Monty" without any of the feel-good uplift, and you'd be pretty close to capturing what this bitter -- and often bitterly funny -- film from Spain is all about.
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70This slow, episodic film is held together by the galvanic presence of Javier Bardem.
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70It's a long and relatively underdramatized film, but it's powerfully true.
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67The lack of sentimentality and rhetoric is refreshing. It's a grown-up movie about some harsh facts of life.
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67Tinged with sadness, and despite overstaying its welcome a wee bit, remains an anthem of insurrection, melding its political and humanistic truths into an almost dreamily subversive film tinged with humor and some small hope.
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63It is intensely involving at the outset, but it faces an insoluble problem: The story, like the characters, has no place to go.
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63Though buoyed by excellent, unflinching performances, this melancholy drama reflects the dismally monotonous lives of its subjects just a little too well.
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60Not an incredible disappointment, but it could have used some more work in making us remain curious about these characters and what their next course of action would be.
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60Neorealism it ain't, but if you have a sufficiently long attention span, there are moments of laugh-out-loud absurdity that are worth the price of admission.
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60Like Fellini's "I vitelloni," this Spanish-French-Italian coproduction is a bittersweet epic about frustration and relative inertia, though with a somewhat older and wiser group of layabouts.
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50Repetitious, uneventful and, in the end, dull.
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50Fortunately, no one seems to have clued Bardem in on the game plan, and the fierceness and complexity he brings to his role nearly saves Mondays In The Sun.
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40Bardem, given the only fully fleshed-out character to play, is a marvel to behold...If only he had found a more soulful, less didactic movie to be plunked down into.
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40It's forgivable, and even appropriate, that Mondays itself suffers from a certain lack of definition -- a drifting, repetitive dead-endedness that, at the inconclusive finale, shows no signs of abating.
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25Midway, Mondays in the Sun becomes as dull as a day with nothing to do.
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AaronS.10wow. some moments of powerful dialogue, impeccably acted. yes, it's restrained.