A Good Year: Critic Reviews

I'll write A Good Year off as nothing more than a bad harvest.

A Good Year, an innocuous, feel-good movie that reunites Russell Crowe with the director Ridley Scott, is a three-P movie: pleasant, pretty and predictable. One might add piddling.

Russell Crowe may find himself discovering the simple joys of life in A Good Year, but audiences will be checking their watches during this joyless attempt at comedy.

Scott and Crowe, who last worked together on Gladiator, should have stuck with the togas; Crowe runs the emotional gamut from bored to perplexed to just plain miserable in a romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor comic.

A shamelessly enjoyable retread, an ode to la belle vie that has been well turned on a factory spindle.

A Good Year offers little return on your own $10 investment beyond the spectacle of Scott misplacing his talents.

Like a fragile Provence wine left too long in the sun, Ridley Scott's romantic comedy A Good Year spoiled somewhere between the publication of Peter Mayle's novel and this cockamamie adaptation.

There isn't a milliliter of honest feeling from start to finish, and precious little comedy or romance.

A Good Year builds so much fairy-tale contrivance with such boisterous high spirits that it's exhausting to keep feeling good about feeling good.

Full of pretentious grape-droppings on how wine is like life, only tastier and with a bolder finish, A Good Year is at best elusive to the palate. At worst, it's a bad pressing of a vintage that has no reisling to exist.

Even judged by the not excessively demanding standards of middle-aged renovation fantasies, A Good Year isn't much.

A pleasant jaunt through one of the most beautiful places on the planet -- encased in a story that ends up making you feel that all is right with the world.

It's no surprise that you can see A Good Year's plot twists and clunker of an ending from a mile away.

It's the first time [Crowe or Scott] has tried his hand at comedy; there's a lot of self-conscious talk about the importance of timing, but the tony sense of entitlement tends to dampen any laughs.

The overall effect is one of a sumptuously laid table where the main course is overcooked.

It's corny and predictable and delightfully simplistic in its goal: to provide a couple of hours of fun. Mission accomplished.

A Good Year feels as if it takes a year to watch, and not a very good year at that.

A simple repast consisting of sometimes strained slapsticky comedy, a sweet romance and a life lesson learned.

A Good Year may not be vintage stuff, but it goes down fairly smoothly.

A Good Year is like a promising wine that's a bit new to the bottle. It goes down rough, but there's this marvelous aftertaste on the palate.

Crowe, a superb dramatic actor, is congenitally incapable of humour, especially when he tries slapstick.

As the audience moves from feast to feast, watching all the screen characters grow, glow and have fun, we can't help but feel like we're the only ones at a party who aren't drinking.

In A Good Year, Crowe gets to make jokes and wisecracks that show off his boyishly mischievous comic timing.

For those who don't mind pictures that fall into predictable rhythms, A Good Year represents a pleasant diversion.