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91Buoyantly clever and amusing.
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90It's an unconscionably funny sex farce that, by its end, turns into a tender and honest romance, an acute portrait of loneliness and, believe it or not, a musical. This is a movie Blake Edwards might have made.
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90Virgin is astoundingly astute but also wondrously clever, written with more care and joy than any hundred comedies to come out of Hollywood in years.
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90Takes a premise that, in less competent, less empathetic hands, would have had the depth of a pancake, gives it a soul and turns it into a surprisingly sweet and funny ode to male friendship and middle-aged love.
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88Surprisingly insightful, as buddy comedies go, and it has a good heart and a lovable hero.
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88Yes, Steve Carell can carry a movie. Yes, Judd Apatow can direct a movie. Yes, we'll all relate to a middle-aged virgin. And yes, when an aesthetician yells to her assistant "we're gonna need more wax," you best run.
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88Hilarious and imaginatively crude with a surprising sweet and subtle aftertaste that prevents it from flopping, limp and brainless, into the sugary abyss of romantic predictability.
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88Works on every level. The humor and language are as crude as an R rating allows, but Carell and Apatow's script is so hip, funny and - yes - innocent that it's never offensive.
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88Rude, raunchy, uproarious, yet with elements that are surprisingly sweet.
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88Even in the service of silliness, no one plays tragic, desperate, and beautiful better than Keener, who together with Carell, makes this film both laugh out loud funny and humane.
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88Probably the most sweet-spirited sex comedy ever made. It's pretty funny, too.
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80This is a superb, delicately calibrated comic performance: Carell never allows the character to swerve into excessive cuddliness.
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80Funny and realistically romantic, but almost never at the same time.
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80Even a starring role in the American version of the British show "The Office," which has given Mr. Carell a higher profile, conveys neither his sheer likability nor his range as an actor, both crucial to making this film work as well as it does.
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80What keeps The 40-Year-Old Virgin out of Rob Schneider territory, however, is: 1) the fact that it's pretty darn funny, and in a way that feels consistently real, and 2) the fact that it's actually an excellent date movie.
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80The 40-Year-Old-Virgin is a hit, I would warrant, because it’s truly dirty and truly romantic at the same time, a combination that's very hard to pull off.
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75Steve Carell, best known as a team player on "The Daily Show," "The Office" and such movies as "Anchorman," earns top-banana status as Andy. He is flat-out hilarious.
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75Apatow's film succeeds in having its virginity and losing it, too. Like "Wedding Crashers," it purges its cynicism with romanticism.
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75A love story that gets the single male culture down so honestly and unapologetically that it can't help but push the boundaries of political correctness.
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75Carell accomplishes the task of being sweet-natured without becoming cloying.
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75A lot of the credit for what's right with 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin goes to the screenplay, which Carell and Apatow wrote. They like these characters and, when it matters, they dare to give them feelings, none truer than Andy's.
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While "Wedding Crashers" ultimately succumbs to endorsing the mushy romantic clichés that it spends the rest of the time ridiculing, The 40-Year-Old Virgin offers a wiser take on the anxieties, negotiations and expectations that surround love and sex, particularly for people who've been burned before.
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75It's not great moviemaking -- it isn't as accomplished or funny as the best of the Farrelly brothers' films, say -- but it's got real appeal.
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70The Virgin script occasionally resets a gold standard for refined crudery.
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The jokes fly fast and sometimes very funny. They are, more often, crude and homophobic. Still, a genuine sweetness lurks.
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67Isn't quite a home run: The visually flat film leans on a pop culture crutch that probably won't age very well, and the finale – while terrifically funny – feels piped in from another, far sillier movie.
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60Too long, too sexist, and too--shall we say--flaccid. But it has its moments.
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60Crude, sophomorically homophobic but frequently funny, pic also overstays its welcome a bit and indulges in some juvenile excesses. All told, though, The 40 Year Old Virgin delivers enough belly laughs.
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50Sticking to one joke in an unconscionably long film makes for a very stale, witless and repetitive comedy.
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50A calculating crowd-pleaser aimed squarely at the under-25 crowd, who can feel free to add a star or two to my rating.
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50Fun without ever being particularly funny, this one-joke comedy-of-bad-manners features a hero who will either tickle your funny bone or make you vaguely uncomfortable.
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50Funny in its deplorable way.
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50In a textbook example of the have-it-both-ways ethos of self-loathing narcissism, Carell has succeeded in creating a character of old-fashioned decency in a movie that otherwise flouts it at every turn.
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50Carell and Apatow collaborated on the script; it does manage a few laughs, but the characters seldom progress beyond the two-dimensional.
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42Judd Apatow brings no cleverness or wit to his one-joke situation, and he can't give it the kernel of credibility that even a low comedy needs to sustain itself for a feature length.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 129 out of 162
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Mixed: 11 out of 162
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Negative: 22 out of 162
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mitchm.1
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alg.3I laughed once.