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Death at a Funeral
MGM


6.5

based on 30 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 49 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: R for language and drug content

Starring Matthew Macfadyen, Andy Nyman, Keeley Hawes, Ewen Bremner, Daisy Donovan, Alan Tudyk, Jane Asher, and Peter Dinklage

On the morning of their father's funeral, the family and friends of the deceased each arrive with his or her own roiling anxieties. Son Daniel knows he will have to face his flirty, blow-hard, famous-novelist brother, Robert, who's just flown in from New York, not to mention the promises of a new life he's made to his wife Jane. Meanwhile, Daniel's cousin Martha and her dependable new fiancé Simon are desperate to make a good impression on Martha's uptight father--a plan that literally goes out the window when Simon accidentally ingests a designer drug en rout to the service. Then there's the mysterious guest who threatens to unveil an earth-shattering family secret. As mayhem and unfortunate mishaps ensue on every front, it is up to the two brothers to hide the truth from their family and friends and figure out how to not only bury their dearly beloved, but the secret he's been keeping. (MGM)

GENRE(S):	Comedy \| Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Dean Craig
DIRECTED BY:	Frank Oz
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: February 26, 2008 Theatrical: August 17, 2007
RUNNING TIME:	90 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Germany / UK / USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

The humor manages to be simultaneously sophisticated, supremely silly and very dark.

Time Richard Schickel

Insanely funny, if occasionally out-of-control, black farce.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The lack of propriety and solemnity is precisely what makes this comic farce so uproariously funny.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The movie is part farce (unplanned entrances and exits), part slapstick (misbehavior of corpses) and part just plain wacky eccentricity. I think the ideal way to see it would be to gather your most dour and disapproving relatives and treat them to a night at the cinema.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

It takes a while for Frank Oz's ensemble black comedy Death at a Funeral to hit its deliriously nutty stride. But when it does, the laughs don't stop until the movie, like the subject of its family get-together, has taken its last breath.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The film's climax is nothing short of hilarious. And Death at a Funeral doesn't discriminate when it comes to the type of humor it embraces it. Everything is in there, from physical hijinks to verbal repartee to naked man jokes to drugs and gross-out stuff.

Chicago Tribune Sid Smith

Death at a Funeral is lethal farce, combining hints of "The Lavender Hill Mob," doses of Joe Orton and a smidgen of the Farrelly brothers' scatology in its mix.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

It has the requisite amount of knockabout silliness.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Though it grows silly and sentimental, Funeral scores enough big laughs to make its shortcomings eminently forgivable.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

The mostly British ensemble can do this stuff in their sleep, but Macfadyen and Donovan and Graves, especially, work up the necessary antic angst and silliness.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The movie maintains its comical, rocky equilibrium as long as the screenwriter, Dean Craig, sticks to domestic disasters and a Monty Python parody of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

This combination of tightly controlled farce and gross-out comedy works unexpectedly well, until the filmmakers lose their nerve at last and settle for cozy homilies. Still, four-fifths of a rarity is about twice as much as studios deliver nowadays.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White

Although set in England with a predominantly British cast, Death at a Funeral is no stiff-upper-lipped comedy, but a lean, mean, and often crude, farce.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Shows us how funny farce can be -- even with the hokiest of premises -- in the hands of the British.

Variety John Anderson

With a circus parade of mourning Brits and enough appalling circumstances to set proper Englishness back to the Dark Ages, Death at a Funeral pits decorum against sex, drugs and dysfunction.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

This topsy-turvy funeral produces a number of smiles, giggles, pleasant guffaws and several solid, sustained laughs. Not a bad batting average as comedies go.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

It goes soft, but even a gelded traditional farce is more potent than most of our slob comedies.

The New York Times Matt Zoller Seitz

There’s no dearth of rude humor on screens right now, but Death at a Funeral stands apart because its characters -- mostly reserved upper-middle-class British folk who have gathered to bury a patriarch -- are determined to keep a stiff upper lip no matter what.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

If your taste runs in this direction, you're bound to be amused.

Austin Chronicle Toddy Burton

A comedy that's refreshing in its courage to embrace tradition and just have fun.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

The dumbness doesn't kill Death at a Funeral, but it certainly weakens it.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Death" builds slowly and inexorably to a comic explosion that's just too good -- too insanely, impossibly mortifying -- to spoil here. Let's just say it dwarfs everything that has come before it.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Most British actors are awfully good at underplaying the overwritten, and this group, headed by Matthew Macfadyen, Rupert Graves and Daisy Donovan, is no exception -- where others would mug, they demitasse.

Empire James Dyer

A sole potty joke is unnecessarily crass, but for the most part this is joyfully funny.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

By the end of Death at a Funeral's effortful farce about busted British propriety, you may feel that peculiar facial ache that comes from wishing to laugh with no really satisfying release.

Village Voice Robert Wilonsky

Death at a Funeral never even approaches the best of Oz's oeuvre. It's his first movie that begs for the laugh track; they'll love it on BBC America.

New York Post Kyle Smith

The movie is a gentle British ensemble comedy much like "Four Weddings and a Funeral" - minus the four weddings and four-fifths of the wit.

Wall Street Journal Joanne Kaufman

"Wrong" is the operative word with Death at a Funeral, which in the first very funny 30 minutes shows its hand and then, unfortunately, continues to wave that hand frantically for the next hour.

TV Guide Ken Fox

While trying so hard to have such a good time, the movie simply forgets to be funny, and begins to grate before the body even cools.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

Modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.5 (out of 10) based on 49 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

To Grant. C gave it a0:
"it is socially acceptable to openly ridicule queers as some kind of warped acknowledgment of their existence - it's not acceptable, and is in fact another form of oppression." Okay, you're reading into this piss poor film way too deeply. It's not oppression. It's bad characterization. Take yourself a bit less seriously and stop thinking everyones out to hate 'queers'.

Matt M gave it a2:
Shocking bad, bland British 'comedy' at its worst. Shallow carbon cut out characters, empty plot, dismal acting, and moves slowly and feels stilted in the direction. Never waste your time, not worth a rent. We should expect so much more from British comedy.

Josh F gave it a9:
Grant c you need to take a chill pill. Gerron k was right, this isn't bashing homosexuality, everyone was freaking out in the movie because the dad was cheating on his wife, the gay thing was a shock to them too but that is just because they were under the assumption for many many years that there dad was straight, they never said anything bad about homosexuality. my brother is gay and he loved the movie, he thought it was hilarious, so I'm not sure why grant c is freaking out. lighten up. Seriously.

Justin H. gave it a7:
Funny, crass at times, but definitely worth a rent.

Nutella gave it an8:
On one hand, the movie could be criticized on abusing that "valium" thing, by like, producing one fourth of the material on it. Next to that, it could be said that it employs some above average humour. On the other hand, the dark part it constitutes, especially the improvised speech given at the end, especially the phrase "being thrown to the world" states some mercilessly true nature in which we actually dwell; the whole schema of existentialism, the inevitable truth of our mortalities. Blended its humor, the movie actually has an attempt to give a perspective of death, in a "no big deal" way. What i mean is, the casket just stays right there whole movie, all there is around death itself, like the way it is in our non funeral lives, as we carry our mortality every single moment we live around the world. To sum up, it narrates somethings beyond that could be rated or voted, worth a watch without hesitation nevertheless, and deserves to invoke the reaction it aims; "what can be more serious where death there is".

Gerron K. gave it an8:
I fail to understand, why Grant C. is having a problem with the gay character in the movie. First of all, have we watched the same movie? The movie doesn't once criticize homosexuality. The characters are surprised by the character's homosexuality, maybe BECAUSE HE WAS MARRIED AND HAD TWO CHILDREN. That's all. At no moment does the film try to ridicule homosexuality. The two brothers show no contempt for the small gay dude, and of course the wife's going to get pissed. While I agree that it's wrong to ridicule queers, you need to chill out. I understand that you hate this movie, but frankly the only reason you gave was the movie openly ridiculed gays, when it didn't at all.

John L. gave it a9:
what a refreshing film :) i highly recommend it to anyone who is tired of the typical American parody garbage that comes out every few months.. here we have a funny cast that unknown to most north American audiences and that makes it so easy to delve into the story and just enjoy it for what it is..it can be dark at times but it has a positive message, and even though i watched it alone it still had me rolling with laughter :) go rent it or if its reasonable buy it ....worth seeking out.

Death at a Funeral MGM

Death at a Funeral
MGM