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80What makes you sit up straight is that The Oranges takes seriously everyone's unhappiness, including the home-wrecker's, without letting anyone off the hook of responsibility for their own becalmed misery.
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75The movie has a saving grace in that it breaks formula. Its concerns are not the usual movie concerns, and it takes what might have been a standard plot in some unexpected directions.
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63While there are laughs, the farcical elements of The Oranges are not presented with sufficient discipline to live up to the full potential of its cast. But as a seven-year veteran of the New Jersey suburban experience, I can testify that it nails the milieu's specifics.
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63Maybe The Oranges does represent a middle-age male fantasy, but Laurie lets you see its pitfalls as well as its pleasures.
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60The storyline delicately tiptoes along the line of good taste and is embroidered by a first-rate cast. Still, a knockout moment is missing.
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60Light as a feather, the movie is at times a modest pleasure, but inconsequential.
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60Ultimately, however, what prevents The Oranges from being the movie it might have been is Farino's inability to settle on a tone.
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58What starts off as a neighborhood scandal becomes a liberating thing for everyone involved - an attitude that seems as if it's trying to be oh so European, and might have been had the director, Julian Farino, not been working so hard to convince us of the Deep Inner Goodness of everyone involved.
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58Overall, The Oranges appears to have been forcibly wrested into a conventional indie-dramedy package, rather than finding the length, style, structure, and perhaps medium that would best suit it.
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50A comedy about a middle-aged dad who has an affair with his neighbour's daughter, The Oranges does not taste freshly squeezed.
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50The result is a placid tale of impulses running wild. Farino is a smooth operator, but he puts little on screen that feels like life, as opposed to a middle-of-the-road indie.
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50While it claims to be exported from New Jersey, The Oranges is peddling an alien motto: When life hands you lemons, fuhgeddaboudit.
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50When the jokes work, it's for a simple reason: The four actors playing the couples are seasoned veterans of film comedy (although each is more than capable of handling dramatic roles, as well).
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50The film is worth seeing for the excellent ensemble work by a cast that, although diligent and appealing, remain somewhat less than thrilling. They do their best to plumb the depths of domestic dysfunction, but in the end, The Oranges does not quite deliver the goods.
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40Janney steals the movie in the scene in which she discovers the awful truth.
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40How could a movie starring Hugh Laurie, Oliver Platt, Allison Janney and Catherine Keener go so wrong? That is the mystery behind The Oranges, a dysfunctional-family comedy - excuse the cliché - that backs away in terror from its potentially explosive subject.
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40Even the actors seem disconnected, with only Leighton Meester - who has the most to prove - working to create a distinguishable character.
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40The Oranges has little original shading.
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Oct 2, 201240The Oranges, an extremely dry comedy directed by Julian Farino, is kind of like a takedown of the suburbs written by the people who designed the menu at Olive Garden: It's inoffensive, forgettable, and you don't actually have to chew anything.
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38What we are not spared is the sort of trite movie that lacks the backbone of any good dysfunctional-family comedy: a thread of the universal amid the absurdity.
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25Unfortunately, there are few screens small enough to properly convey how inessential another deadpan suburbs satire is in 2012.
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20Neither Janney nor Keener can rise above the rote hatefulness of their madwoman caricatures, whereas Laurie and Meester fare better at playing liberated dreamers who go against the dreaded grain. But shooting fish in a barrel tends to unintentionally conjure sympathy for the fish - or, in this case, for perfectly unhappy suburbanites.
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Oct 3, 20120As much as the dialogue in the film voices an attitude of self-liberation and champions the positives of severing accepted social constraints, it seems to be constantly taking one step forward and two steps back.
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