|
New This Week
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search
Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Death at a Funeral
MGM
 |
|
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.
90
Time
Richard Schickel
Insanely funny, if occasionally out-of-control, black farce.
88
USA Today
Claudia Puig
The lack of propriety and solemnity is precisely what makes this comic farce so uproariously funny.
75
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.
75
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.
75
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.
75
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.
75
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
It has the requisite amount of knockabout silliness.
75
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Nathan Rabin
Though it grows silly and sentimental, Funeral scores enough big laughs to make its shortcomings eminently forgivable.
75
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.
75
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."
75
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.
75
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.
70
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
Shows us how funny farce can be -- even with the hokiest of premises -- in the hands of the British.
70
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.
70
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.
70
New York Magazine
David Edelstein
It goes soft, but even a gelded traditional farce is more potent than most of our slob comedies.
70
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.
70
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
If your taste runs in this direction, you're bound to be amused.
67
Austin Chronicle
Toddy Burton
A comedy that's refreshing in its courage to embrace tradition and just have fun.
63
Premiere
Glenn Kenny
The dumbness doesn't kill Death at a Funeral, but it certainly weakens it.
63
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.
63
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.
60
Empire
James Dyer
A sole potty joke is unnecessarily crass, but for the most part this is joyfully funny.
58
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.
50
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.
50
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.
50
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.
50
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.
50
Portland Oregonian
M. E. Russell
Modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge.
 The average user rating for this movie is 6.7 (out of 10) based on 57 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Read more user comments...
Discuss this movie in our forums |
|
