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88A human-scale comedy that reaches across generations to tickle, connect and embrace.
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80Leelee Sobieski and Albert Brooks, especially Mr. Brooks, deliver outstanding performances in the first feature film to be directed by Ms. Lahti.
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80As it stands, it's cute, occasionally poignant and outrageously implausible.
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75About reaching out, about seeing the other person, about having something to say and being able to listen. So what if the ending is in autopilot? At least it's a flight worth taking.
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75Offers something rare for a modern movie: an uncynical depiction of the redemptive power of human relationships.
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75While My First Mister has considerable charm, it suffers somewhat from comparison with "Ghost World."
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75Risks seeming too earnestly therapeutic for its own good. But what makes My First Mister a successful feature directing debut for Lahti is the emotional veracity it summons.
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70Christine Lahti, making her directorial debut, wrings good laughs and strong emotion throughout, largely through the performances.
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70In its first two-thirds, My First Mister, which marks Christine Lahti's feature directorial debut, looks to be a winner. But it takes a disastrously wrong turn toward the end that all but destroys the good work that's come before.
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70It's a measure of Brooks' stature that he survives the self-sabotage and comes through with his most engaging performance in years.
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63It's a real shame the film gets mushy at the end. The result is an all too conventional ending on a film that should have been much better.
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50Sobieski manages to make Jennifer's inevitable transformation more than a little bittersweet. Apparently even clichés click sometimes.
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50The harder this film tries to be quirky and edgy, the more it feels like a run-of-the mill TV movie.
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50Lahti's feature directorial debut plays like a watered-down variation ("Ghost World") -- that is, until the final third, when the film not only deviates but flat out derails.
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50The splendid performance by Sobieski, who ends her long run as industry-mag buzz princess and arrives as a full-fledged star.
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50My First Mister, which was written by Jill Franklyn, watches Jennifer with lively interest, but rarely pierces the mysteries of her soul.
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50A bathetic TV-movie-type "learning experience" that provides about as much insight into teenagers as 40s westerns did into Indians--it's all in the costumes and customs.
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42Brooks guards the movie from overheating in a surfeit of warmedy.
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42By the film's interminable, unforgivably embarrassing third act it sinks in a sticky swamp of sentimentality.
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40Lahti's feature directorial debut walks an innocuous middle line between the story's maudlin possibilities and its meaningful potential.
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38Drifts from goofy situation comedy to pop culture parody to a last-act load of sentiment that would sink a trash barge.
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30One hundred and nine minutes of drama and not a single moment rings true.
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30Although the movie has its moments, it's a tearjerker that jerks too hard.
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25A coming-of-age story that gets it all wrong.
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20The best that can be said about director Christine Lahti's feature debut is that it doesn't fall into any ready category.
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20The movie is fussy and organized rather than moving. It follows a pattern so precisely, it's as if Lahti thought points would be taken off if she colored outside the lines.
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16Intelligent teens will hate this film, and adults will just be embarrassed.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 12
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Mixed: 1 out of 12
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Negative: 0 out of 12
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Lain10
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JoeQ.10Not for the sophisticate but rings true. Fine work by the principals - Sobieki & Brooks most for all - no false surfaces.
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PatriciaS.10