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100A sublime meditation that is one of this year's wisest, warmest and funniest films.
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100Venus is a magnificent tribute to actors by filmmakers who know they are the essential human material of theater and the screen.
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100Told with wit, genuine poignancy and all kinds of humor, Venus charts the unlikely relationship between a man in his 70s and a young woman more than half a century his junior.
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91A man can be a treasure just as a work of art can be, and O'Toole is one of the handful of living film actors worthy of a museum of his own. Venus would make a brilliant final exhibit.
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90Venus belongs to O'Toole. This is, hands down, my favorite performance of the year, largely because I love the way O'Toole (and the filmmakers) refuse to yield to the all-too-pervasive idea that it's "icky" for old people to even think about sex.
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90Venus may be a leering male fantasy, but it is also, improbably but persuasively, a love story as tender as it is transgressive. It's a wry celebration of the tyranny of beauty, and the tragicomic way in which desire outruns the betrayals of dying flesh.
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90A heartbreaking comedy that is simultaneously funny and sad, raunchy and sweet, funky and elegiac. These fresh, unexpected juxtapositions are a specialty of the writer Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"), a sworn enemy of cliché.
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89The quiet respect Venus displays toward lions in winter, defanged though they may be, is rare enough; the film's respect for unfinessed lionesses-to-be is rarer still. Wherever they're going, no one here is going quietly.
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88Peter O'Toole, still a British cinematic lion at 74, performs another movie miracle in the Roger Michell-Hanif Kureishi film Venus.
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88Peter O'Toole, looking frail beyond his 74 years, gives what may be his farewell performance as a leading movie actor in Roger Michell's Venus. It's one for the books - and maybe the Oscars, too.
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88The great thing about Venus - apart from its sharp eye for the daily routines and drab details of senior citizenry in a buzzing metropolis - is that it isn't soppy, or sentimental.
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88Venus is rollickingly funny at times -- but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness.
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83The screenplay is by Hanif Kureishi, who wrote "The Mother" for Michell and also scripted the classic "My Beautiful Laundrette." He has a feeling for outsiders.
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83Venus is the second film from director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi to explore the sexual lives of folk that the movies treat as sexless -- the elderly. But where "The Mother" was a cold film of sexual greed and emotional pettiness, this robust yet delicate comic drama finds a kind of dignity in the old lothario whose vital life force struggles against a failing body.
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83O'Toole is frail and probably won't make many more movies. So Venus is pitched partly as a fond farewell to a beloved artist, and his whole beautiful generation.
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80The amazing thing about Venus is that it's brutally honest about all this but at the same time funny as hell.
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80A screen-acting showcase by a man whose best days, many thought, were behind him. There's life in the old dog yet.
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Maurice, the protagonist of Venus, is a suit lovingly tailored to O'Toole's ravaged but commanding frame.
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80Since the movie is about desire -- not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide -- it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi's knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination.
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80Awash in terrific performances.
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80Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi take a deeper, edifying interest in the moral ambiguities that arise between Maurice and Jessie. And thanks to our warm investment in both characters, we're more than willing to sign up for this existential ride. We allow this relationship -- and the movie -- to take us places we'd never usually go.
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80This comedy drama is an exercise in self-indulgence for O'Toole, but an enjoyable and touching one.
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75O'Toole gives a staggering performance -- fearless, defiantly untamed and in its own way a work of art.
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75The suggestion that Peter O'Toole is playing some version of his real self in Venus adds a bittersweet poignancy to this quietly affecting British drama.
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75Though O'Toole, whose ruined beauty Michell emphasizes in frequent and tight close-ups, and newcomer Whittaker have a striking rapport, the film's most haunting moments pair him with Vanessa Redgrave -- amazingly, this is their first movie together -- as his ex-wife. They evoke a lifetime of love, betrayal, regret and forgiveness in the space of a few lines, then move on without missing a beat.
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75Peter O'Toole's tour-de-force performance makes Venus a movie not to be missed.
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75This is a brave movie because it addresses a subject Hollywood feels uncomfortable about.
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75Like similar English comedies, it also teeters on the mawkish.
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70Venus is worth seeing for the scenes between O'Toole and Vanessa Redgrave as the woman he abandoned--the mother of his children.
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70Genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns, breezily enjoyable throughout.
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70Melancholy but enjoyable.
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67Venus has a swank pedigree, but in this case that doesn't mean it's much more than a quaint machine to elicit tears and awards.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 12
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Mixed: 0 out of 12
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Negative: 1 out of 12
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TomM.6
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JH10I loved this movie. O'Toole is magnificent and the story was beautifully engaging, hilarious, and tragic. Don't miss this one.
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KentB.2