Dan in Real Life: Critic Reviews

Dan in Real Life is a comedy of faith that, in its wised-up feel-good way, restores yours.

Dan in Real Life is neither wildly farcical nor mockingly cruel, but rather, for the most part, winningly gentle and observant.

It's amiable enough, but the ickiness levels are too high and Juliette Binoche always looks uncomfortable in this shallow-end material.

Why must so many family-friendly romantic comedies give us such wan, forgettable dialogue and predictable situations? Dan is derivative at best, and feels like filmmaking by focus group at worst.

The kind of sentimental, patently false romantic pandering whose idea of resolving a scene is for everyone to engage in some cute form of eccentric group activity.

Dan in Real Life lacks the nerve of genuine storytelling. It's for moviegoers who would have preferred Little Miss Sunshine if that movie hadn't been so gosh-darn dark.

One could fill this entire space with the titles of films from which writer-director Peter Hedges nicks his story.

Sweet it is. Remotely connected to real life, however, it is not.

No sooner than you're stirred by something surprising or genuinely sweet, you're shaken by another piece of shtick.

Dan in Real Life is an enjoyable if curious creature, a naturalistic ensemble comedy wed to a high-flown sitcom premise. It's infused with a warm optimism that prevails even through the drama's thornier patches.

There are some loud moments and big laughs.

A low-key, highly agreeable charmer.

The setup of this comedy by director-cowriter Peter Hedges and some subsequent twists may be contrived, and the laughs aren't very plentiful, but much of the behavior seems real, and the able cast makes the most of it.

Almost reflexively, the filmmakers skirt Dan's messier conflicts. But it is the moments when they don't dance around the awkward issue of a brother falling for his brother's girl that Dan is the most poignant.

For all its by-the-numbers plotting, Dan in Real Life is winningly good-natured and funny.

The previews make Dan in Real Life look like a tepid romantic comedy that makes little use of Steve Carell's gifts. Well, the previews are right.

To call this feel-good comedy conservative is to cede 'family values' to the realm of politics, which, despite a vague NPR-ishness to the characters, is something Real Life refuses to do.

Gracefully understated and thoroughly engaging.

One character says she's looking for something 'not necessarily hahaha laugh-out-loud funny, something human funny,' and that's what we get.

The heart is there, and the message gets you.

A movie nicely packed with pleasantly unpredictable surprises.

In the end, the commercial necessity of wrapping up a family comedy in less than 100 minutes seems to have trumped anything real about Dan's life.

There's nothing groundbreaking about Dan in Real Life -- it's a picture that could have been made 10 or 20 years ago -- and yet its easygoing, affable nature is exactly what makes it pleasurable.

Beneath its aw-shucks, wants-to-be-liked exterior, this is a bankrupt motion picture. It's cloying, artificial, and not the least bit romantic.

While not a perfect comedy, Dan is certainly a crowd-pleasing, cleverly engineered and well-executed divertissement that should put grins on the faces of movie fans of many ages and execs at Disney and Focus Features.