| 91 |
Entertainment Weekly
Pungent, funny, and surprisingly forceful.
|
| 63 |
New York Post
Doesn't live up to the promise of its trailers.
|
| 63 |
USA Today
Another one of those high-gloss treatments of domestic strife that want to have it both ways. Sitcom-slick, melodrama-edgy.
|
| 63 |
Miami Herald
Phoebe Flowers
Too easily, and predictably, resolves itself.
|
| 63 |
Chicago Tribune
Disturbingly lightweight and emotionally risk-free.
|
| 50 |
TNT RoughCut
Morgan Fouch
Willis and Pfeiffer do manage to keep you awake, but you're essentially watching your own marriage up there. And you don't need to pay a sitter to do that.
|
| 50 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
I scratched my head in wonder as to why this pair of one-dimensional characters couldn't find happiness in such a shallow story.
|
| 50 |
Film.com
Tries so hard to push all the pre-ordained buttons, and it's so anxious to be liked, nay, adored, that it left me sullen and uninvolved instead.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
A squirmy mix of therapy-session slogans, pop psychobabble, and lots of crying, yelling and pouting on the part of its two stars, who appear in various alarming hairpieces.
|
| 50 |
Dallas Observer
M. V. Moorhead
Snappily directed and edited, and there are moments of funny acting...but the script is all homiletic commonplaces, in quip form, and the wisdom is both stale and dubious.
|
| 50 |
Rolling Stone
Turns into a bogus drivel courtesy of a sitcom monster.
|
| 50 |
Los Angeles Times
Wants to be an honest look at the problems that can beset a modern marriage, and be funny at the same time, but it doesn't have the skills or the temperament to pull all that off.
|
| 50 |
Variety
The stylistic devices used, which recall early Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky, get increasingly tedious, disrupting not only the sequence of events but also squelching audience sympathy for the protagonists.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
Overwrought comedy-drama.
|
| 50 |
Boston Globe
Conspicuously short on the kind of texture that makes us feel we're watching real people living real lives.
|
| 42 |
Portland Oregonian
Conveys an almost pulseless Nora Ephron style of homespun wisdom.
|
| 40 |
Time
Mostly the movie is like the marriage: good casting, golden promise, yet somehow a grating ordeal.
|
| 40 |
TV Guide
Slick and glib when it means to be profound yet ruefully witty; its rhythms are pure sitcom, complete with emotional rimshots.
|
| 40 |
Austin Chronicle
Merry witticisms collide with empty clichés, leaving these characters with little trace of realism.
|
| 40 |
Film.com
A skim-milk version of a yuppie romance.
|
| 38 |
Baltimore Sun
Never makes the Jordans' tribulations feel like anything more than yuppie angst.
|
| 38 |
Charlotte Observer
You can get all of this free on television any week, so why pay for it?
|
| 34 |
Mr. Showbiz
This is a second-rate Woody Allen midlife crisis comedy without the laughs.
|
| 30 |
Chicago Reader
The script...and Rob Reiner's direction...bristle with phoniness.
|
| 30 |
LA Weekly
The wet blanket of undigested autobiography lies all over Rob Reiner's excruciating new opus about a marriage winding down into terminal atrophy.
|
| 30 |
Newsweek
So bland and un-lived in you want to pour Tabasco all over the screen.
|
| 30 |
Salon.com
Fragmented and contrived, like a badly mapped-out scrapbook.
|
| 25 |
Christian Science Monitor
Audiences may want their own speedy divorce from this irritating collection of stale jokes, pointless vulgarities, and warmed-over clichés.
|
| 25 |
Chicago Sun-Times
A sad-sack movie about the misery of a married couple who fight most of the time. Watching it is like taking a long trip in a small car with the Bickersons.
|
| 25 |
San Francisco Chronicle
The movie's most inexcusable failing is that, despite all the flashbacks, we never get a sense of what this relationship was like when it worked.
|
| 20 |
Village Voice
Justine Elias
Maudlin, irritating marital drama.
|
| 20 |
The New York Times
Janet Maslin
Though it sets out to explain why this marriage is worth saving, The Story of Us could prompt even single members of the audience to file for divorce.
|
| 20 |
Washington Post
Folks, I really feel that seeing this one for you is the movie critic's equivalent of jumping on the grenade to save your lives. Send me medals.
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