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80Scafaria gives her characters and the situation an absurdist tone that makes the whole concept a little more palatable.
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67One of the great things Scarfaria brings to this project is her apparent ability to convince a slew of wonderful actors to perform in small roles that appear in only a single sequence. That describes most of the actors in this film apart from the two leads.
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50Carell's performance is enjoyable but safe, and while he and Knightley play well enough together, there's no genuine chemistry - no zap to convince us these two deserve to be the last lovers on Earth.
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Jun 19, 201280A charmingly lo-fi love story.
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88The film has two active virtues, too. It shows human beings in all their pitiable, noble, stupid or sensitive modes of action, and it reminds us there's always time to fall in love, if only for a few days.
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70Scafaria, making her feature debut as writer-director, scores numerous laughs off the social dislocation that follows as people realize the apocalypse is imminent (there's a funny sequence at a suburban house party where no taboo goes unbroken).
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75The best parts of this sweet film involve the middle stretches, when time, however limited, reaches ahead, and the characters do what they can to prevail in the face of calamity. How can I complain that they don't entirely succeed? Isn't the dilemma of the plot the essential dilemma of life?
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50What it doesn't have is a way of making sense of its comic and dramatic strains, together, in the same movie.
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83In our summertime-movie world of aliens and superheroes who look all too familiar, Dodge and Penny look all the rarer in their precious humanity.
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67It pitches a tone between comedy and tragedy that holds unique appeal.
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40Starts imploding long before the massive asteroid hurtling toward Earth is due to deliver annihilation.
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50As Seeking a Friend for the End of the World crawls toward its sentimental finale, you're rooting for that asteroid to get here, quick.
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Jun 20, 201260Combines a deviously tragicomic take on the approaching annihilation of mankind with a irritatingly unconvincing and unnecessary love story.
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80Perhaps the best thing about Seeking a Friend is that it never ceases to surprise, as Scafaria's script consistently defies Hollywood convention in the most congenial ways.
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80One of the year's most emotionally affecting movies.
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60The whole movie is a good try.
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75Intelligent, dignified and emotionally satisfying.
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38Has its laughs, but pretty much every single one of them is in the trailer. And even more unfortunately, the improbable new romantic comedy team of Steve Carell and Keira Knightley works about as well as you'd guess - like oil and water.
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50Scafaria's movie never catches fire. The bad news: The end of the world comes with a whimper. Worse: And two wimps.
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91Predictable, contrived, sappy and, ultimately, against all odds, remarkably fulfilling.
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75Not mainstream fare, but neither is it as willfully obtuse as "Melancholia."
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50I never rooted for them as a couple, never felt a chemistry in their bond. And in a romance, even one with tragic notes, that really is the end of the world.
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75Sweet and serious as it is, the second chunk of Seeking a Friend is the lesser of the two - and hard to reconcile with the more acidic comic outlook in the film's first half. The obvious movie referent is Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," a much nastier film in a much lovelier wrapping: This one lacks an eight-minute Wagner montage.
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38A predictable, drawn-out romantic comedy that happens to be set in the shadow of impending apocalypse.
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63If the world were really coming to an end, we'd spend it with Knightley and tell her tag-along friend that there's not enough food for a 50-year-old virgin.
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100It's more amusing than you might expect, and ultimately more touching than an eroding society around them deserves.
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67Knightley is pure Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, a vinyl-toting sparkplug who serves mostly to shake Carell from his dead-eyed stupor, but the relationship between the two becomes more touching as their wayward journey goes on.
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63In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the times may be hard but the apocalypse is soft. Welcome to the anti-"Melancholia."
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Jun 18, 201270With its sharp script and bittersweet humor, the audacious premise feels fresh enough to earn a large word-of-mouth audience among moviegoers who would normally avoid a more conventional rom-com, potentially becoming a left-field breakout hit in the mode of "Juno" or "Little Miss Sunshine."
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50After a sharp and promising start, she (Ms. Scafaria) allows the movie to collapse into a mild, lump-in-the-throat romantic comedy that is not made significantly more urgent or interesting by the prospect of global calamity.
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70When Seeking took hold of me, completely and without warning, I was digging for tissues. It's a lovely surprise for the official start of summer.
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40The casting is spectacularly wrong, and even on its own scant merits, writer-director Lorene Scafaria's screenplay has little insight into apocalyptic licentiousness, barring a tart line or two.
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88This is a romantic comedy for people who don't like rom-coms. There's no chance of a happy ending, but its tender mercies speak volumes.
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Jun 19, 201240The end of the world can't come fast enough in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, a disastrously dull take on the disaster-movie formula.
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Jun 19, 201240By turns bizarrely affectless and then prattlingly manic, much like its dual protagonists.
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38A strange little movie. Unsure whether it wants to be a quirky, sad-eyed indie pixie or a brassy, raunchy broad, it veers uneasily between the two, never quite settling into a comfortable or recognizable groove.