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100Hysterically funny yet melancholy comedy.
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100Pure movie bliss.
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100The characters are played not by the first actors you would think of casting, but by actors who will prevent you from ever being able to imagine anyone else in their roles.
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100A boisterous, brilliant, heart-warming comedy--strikes me as just about perfect.
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100What makes it the best movie of the year -- is its insight into human behavior.
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100The best comedy of 2004. In fact, it's so far the best movie of the year.
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100A sublime variation on the buddy road movie, infusing the midlife crises of the two main protagonists with hope and poetry.
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100Exhilarating, edgy and wryly comic.
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100Payne's little marvel.
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100This is a building-block movie: Its stand-out excellence becomes apparent only gradually.
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100It's a performance (Giamatti's) so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should.
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100Every performance here is wonderful, and the movie abounds in moments so true as to be cringe-worthy.
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100A film that celebrates the intricacies of life in ways both splendid and mundane, revealing it all with unflinching honesty.
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100U.S. geography doesn't matter to Payne. He always charts the terrain of the human heart, and he's among the wisest of mapmakers.
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100Not a masterpiece, but definitely one of the year's most entertaining movies.
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100Brilliantly observed characters are becoming second nature to Payne and Taylor, and the performances here are uniformly terrific. This is wonderful, original stuff.
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100It's an intoxicating feeling when a movie excites and enlivens us like this -- and there's a particular giddiness to be had in thinking about what movies can (but don't often) do for one's soul after imbibing such a fine vintage.
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100Sweetest, funniest, most humane movie I've seen all year.
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100Exactly written, directed with a surgeon's precision and transcendently acted, Sideways brings emotional reality to a consistently amusing character comedy, making it something to be cherished like the delicate Santa Ynez Valley wines that are the story's vivid backdrop.
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100In Sideways, Payne has created four of the most lived-in, indelible characters in recent American movies. This deliciously bittersweet movie makes magic out of the quotidian.
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100Sideways is by far the year's best American movie.
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100Sideways makes you glad about America, about movies, about life.
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100One of the most pleasurable movies of the year.
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100There's not a false note here, and the entire supporting cast -- is uniformly excellent.
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91Gets under your skin without you quite being able to say when or how. It has the tact to let you draw yourself in to it.
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90Alexander Payne is becoming one of the greatest American directors of modern cinema and again, Sideways is on its way to being one of the best films of the year.
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90A trenchant American satirist in his previous films, Payne moves in a different direction with Sideways -- one less mordant but just as pointedly observant.
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90Good comedies are rare, but rarer still are those that conflate laughter with intimacy.
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90Jack and Miles are male archetypes, as well as the two most fully realized comic creations in recent American movies.
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For the most part, Sideways is a great movie--impeccably written, directed and acted--that takes its characters on a journey toward something new.
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90Like the film itself, the performance (Giamatti's) is deeply controlled, played with restraint and with microscopic attention to detail.
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90A warm, ingratiating, and fitfully hilarious epicurean road movie with a steady ache-an ache like a red-wine hangover.
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90A beautifully observed, small-scale study of personal foibles, romantic uncertainty and two sides of the sadly predictable male animal.
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90In this role Giamatti gives his bravest, most generously humane performance yet. Women may be repelled, but men will know this man, because, at one time or another, many of us have been this man.
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88It's likely that 2004 won't offer a better movie about a mid-life crisis.
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83Wise, entertaining and often very funny.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 218 out of 380
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Mixed: 43 out of 380
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Negative: 119 out of 380
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RodG.6
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10