Catch and Release: Critic Reviews

I just don't know any chick who will make sense of this flick -- it's that blitheringly out of touch with present psychosexual (never mind feminist) time and space.

The romantic comedy Catch and Release is refreshing for what it doesn't have. There is no whiny, spoiled golden girl and no baring of claws.

A ghastly sort of Nora Ephron-ish good taste pervades this romcom-tearjerker.

Release yourself from boredom by giving it a miss.

Despite the film's attempts to imbue Garner with spark, she simply disappears into the supporting pack in a film that doesn't know if it's rom-coming or going.

The film's a pleasant enough daydream before it turns all squoodgy at the end.

A film that a talented veteran of romantic comedy would have had trouble pulling off, let alone a screenwriter (Susannah Grant wrote Erin Brockovich) who has never directed a film before.

The film suffers from a style that settles for pleasant or touching at the cost of spontaneous or impassioned. Too bad, because Ms. Garner is a genuinely pleasing presence.

A romantic comedy-drama with little comedy, no drama and less romance than your average YouTube video.

Forgettable seriocomic blather from writer-director Susannah Grant.

Jennifer Garner may possess the hardest working eyebrows in show business, but Kevin Smith gets the acting kudos in this bittersweet romance.

However diverting are Garner, Smith and the scenery, the ricochet-romance aspect of Grant's film is, frankly, icky.

If it should happen that one day Netflix includes Catch and Release among "Movies you'd also enjoy," consider cancelling your subscription.

A noteworthy mess for the sheer mass of talent it squanders, Catch and Release is best not caught.

Catch & Release? Nah. Try Net & Forget.

Deals with serious issues -- sudden death, grief, infidelity, deception -- in a fairly lighthearted way. What makes that worse is that there are a few moments when the film actually approaches some kind of emotional or dramatic truth.

The chick comedy-drama Catch and Release may look bland, but it's not. It's worse. To rise to the level of blandness, it would need to have a few gallons of Tabasco dumped into it.

Catch and Release is a perfectly likable romantic tragi-comedy, and therein lies the problem. If the essence of drama and comedy is conflict, what do you get when you wash the conflict away in an effort to make everybody 'likable'?

Were it not for [Kevin] Smith's mildly amusing antics, it might have been necessary to attach a warning to the movie about the dangers of watching it whilst operating heavy machinery.

The romantic dramedy Catch and Release is off the mark in so many respects one wonders if it would have been more humane to release this one directly into the DVD stream.

One of those movies where the small pleasures stack up high enough to dwarf the disappointments.

Despite possessing a few effective and affecting scenes, Catch and Release is a mess and the methods it uses to bring closure to its diverse storylines feel trite and contrived.

...A likable romantic comedy that delivers enough laughs and star appeal to fare reasonably well in the date-movie department, even if it doesn't entirely live up to its ambitions.

This fish-themed romance flops wildly all over the place, from heavy poignant moments to slapsticky comedy, with a healthy dose of soapy melodrama in between.

A romantic non-comedy.