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88Tamara Drewe is one of those British comedies in which, one way or another, we envy all of the characters.
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85On its own terms, Tamara Drewe is a hugely exuberant black comedy, unfolding over four scenic seasons at a writer's retreat set in a rose-strewn village overrun by city bobos in search of authenticity.
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83Erotic comedies are often attempted but rarely realized. Tamara Drewe is proof that sexy and funny need not be mutually exclusive.
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80Jaunty and entertaining.
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80Think The Archers with a sprinkling of trendier folk and a lot more shagging. Very intelligently funny, with stellar performances.
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80The deadly sins of envy, lust and salacious gossip in deepest rural England provide the motor for Stephen Frears's black romp, featuring vivacious former Bond girl Gemma Arterton.
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75It's a tart trifle, but in the madding crowd of year-end movies, Tamara Drewe rocks.
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75The cast is delightful top to bottom, although Arterton's role is chiefly defined by seductive smiles and the rise of her cut-off shorts. Allam and Cooper are standouts, creating hormonally despicable characters getting more of Tamara's attention than they deserve.
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75In addition to all the rollicking, ribald humor, Tamara Drewe also has a couple of flashes of darkly comic violence. In a literary sense, it's poetic justice, really. Punishment meted out for bad behavior.
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75A real old-fashioned crowd-pleaser.
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75While Tamara Drew is enjoyable throughout-right up to its loony, loony ending-it's more than a little scattered.
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70Frears might have accelerated the comic pacing, but the story is a good one and events come nicely to a boil.
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70So here's my second and final verdict on the movie: it's as captivating as its heroine.
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70Adapted from a comicstrip-turned-graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, which was itself based on Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd," picture represents a satirical but soft-biting swipe at contempo middle-class mores among Blighty's chattering countryside classes.
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70The story's literary underpinnings are hilariously represented by the denizens of a seedy writers' retreat situated near Tamara's old house, which she has come back to reclaim after her mother's death.
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70Thomas Hardy it's not, but as far as middlebrow British romances go, better this than "Love Actually."
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65Most of Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe is so breezily entertaining, and so bracingly clear-eyed about what total pains in the asses writers can be, that its final 15 minutes feel like an all-wrong slap in the face.
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63Tamara Drewe is so light, it's almost pure froth.
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63It's easy to watch.
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63A frolic that keeps tripping over its own gorgeous feet.
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60Strikingly picturesque locations and a terrific ensemble cast help this tonally inconsistent adaptation of Posy Simmonds's comic series pass by with relative ease, though it leaves a very peculiar aftertaste.
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50While we may ogle Tamara, blush at her charms and revel in her world, in the end Tarama Drewe is just a bit of Brit tease that doesn't come off.
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50If there's a breath of fresh air in it all, it's in the form of the young actress Jessica Barden playing a smoking, swearing, Tom Sawyer-flavored teenage delinquent determined to add some life to her excruciatingly boring rural existence.
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50The tone is both satiric and serious, zany but heartfelt, and for a while - maybe 20 minutes - all seems well.
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50This rotely cheeky, Anglo-plastic adultery comedy is set in the golden-green English countryside, and it makes a few quirky nods toward artistry, but it's really just a glib concoction.
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50It all leaves "Drewe" and its often jarring turns of motivation and tone - feeling haphazard and cartoony, and the whole thing more a vibrant mess than something comically disarming.
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50There is something shallow and cautious about this film, which strains to maintain a glib, cheery demeanor that is not always appropriate to the details of the story.
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40The book itself is an easy read -- conveniently enough, it shouldn't take you more than two hours. So you might want to skip the discordant copy, and use that time to discover the real thing.