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50If only someone had taken away that disastrous third act we'd have one of the better mainstream films dealing with the impossible societal demands put upon gay parenting yet made. No such luck, though.
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38Of Madonna's considerable talents, making the camera love her isn't one: The screen seems to go dead every time she's on it.
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38Never having decided whether it wants to be comedy or a sentimental hand-wringer, it tries to be both and winds up being neither.
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63Characters behave arbitrarily and incredibly, and a clumsy resolution brings the film to a thudding halt.
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20The whole thing becomes a very rickety and contrived tearjerker.
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25A garage sale of gay issues, harnessed to a plot as exhausted as a junkman's horse.
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63All too obvious, all too easy, the sort of tongue-in-chic L.A. comedy that mistakes glibness for high style, heartfelt pop choruses for wisdom.
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25The movie has a well-meaning message about love and loyalty being the bedrock of real family values, but its good intentions sag as the story trades its air of mischievous comedy for trite sentimentality, arbitrary plot twists, and enough maudlin melodramatics to sustain a tabloid TV series.
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10Nobody involved will want to make this banal "comedy" a highlight of their résumé, not if they have any sense.
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(Madonna is) clearly full of good intentions; too bad she's lacking discernible emotions.
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20Doesn't even rise to the level of camp, of being so-bad-it's-good. It's just flat out bad.
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10A dismal film, a flop as both 21st-century romantic comedy and gay "Kramer vs. Kramer."
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20No one ever turns into a real character, and none of the scenes have either dramatic or comedic resonance.
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20A misguided romantic serio-comedy aimed at women and gay men that ends up caricaturing both.
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25A fluffy, feel-bad drama, with some serious things to say about the viability of homosexual men as fathers and role models.
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69The two leads have a wonderful chemistry together.
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50Not even Rupert Everett is able to breathe life into soapy Thing.
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25If the movie were funny, the implicit sermonizing would be more tolerable, but apart from four or five good one-liners, The Next Best Thing is a thudding failure as a comedy.
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20Screenwriter Ropelewski piles one silly plot contrivance upon another, and the characters start behaving like nitwits.
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25Contrived story lines and an altogether phony resolution erase whatever energy and wit the film displayed, leaving the viewer with an empty, disappointed feeling.
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16A resolutely awful film, it makes you want to swear off sex, comedy, Rupert Everett movies, flowers, yoga, children, roast beef -- many of the best things in life, in fact.
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50Essentially an old-fashioned weepie gussied up for Y2K.
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10Takes so many wrong turns it's barely an also-ran. It isn't the next best thing at all. Not even close.
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25That's a few too many agendas for one film.
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50Has good intentions and the element of surprise -- it's never quite clear where it's going at any given point.
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10The moment the movie loses its lighthearted spirit is the moment it loses touch with reality
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40Cross an episode of "Friends" with an issue-of-the-week movie about gay parenthood and you have this glossy vanity project.
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50Funny how Madonna borrows Everett, Julia Roberts' gay pal from "My Best Friend's Wedding," and Bratt, Roberts' real-life beau, to be her co-stars. If only she could borrow her talent.
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30Likely lack of much critical enthusiasm or positive word-of-mouth will induce quick theatrical falloff, with better news likely down the line for rental merchants.
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10A vanity project -- hell-bent on playing barely human characters as themselves, they've created something quitebewilderingly ugly in the process.
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30Really two movies in one, and there's not enough breathing room for both of them.