Down With Love: Critic Reviews

A succulent piece of postmodern fluff.

Intelligent and amusing, even if it never achieves the full-tilt zany desperation of Delbert Mann's Lover Come Back.

It's a cute premise, and several co-stars help keep the fun going for a while.

It's like a Saturday Night Live sketch on a $60 million budget.

Makes the fatal mistake of so much middlebrow satire: It becomes that which it mocks.

I'm unembarrassed to say I enjoyed myself a lot, even if this giddily retro Renee Zellweger-Ewan McGregor vehicle shifts tone the way a bicycle skips gears.

[Zellweger's] trademark squint and complete-me bewilderment dissolve her considerable stylized armor and scan as sad, table-scrap hunger.

In the spirit of the film's buoyant campiness, may I say, up with Down With Love?

This might have worked if love triumphed, but mush gets lost in the crush of labored mocking and gleeful artifice.

Down With Love's affection is tainted with condescension, and the movie becomes a charade of winks and nudges.

While you were hypnotized by the bossa nova and Renee Zellweger's form-fitting pink Givenchy and the rat-a-tat dialogue of the gender wars, the writers and the director tricked you into caring about the plot.

No better or worse than the movies that inspired it, but that is a compliment, I think.

An irritation, more fizzle than sizzle.

It's pure pleasure to watch Zellweger and McGregor bound across a set with the swinger confidence of Frank Sinatra taking the stage of the Sands Hotel.

Hammy, campy and gloriously cheesy.

The complete lack of authentic feeling in this film as well as its obsession with period without finding any meaning in that period doom it.

By the end, you'll probably be whistling a happy tune.

I think it compares favorably with Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back in its well-timed gags and verbal dexterity.

It's too dull and hackneyed for the satirical spoof it intends to be, and the actors and director miss the charm and humor of the old Doris Day movies by a margin so wide it doesn't add up to a respectful homage, either.

Good for a laugh and even better for mining fashion tips.

If you love those old movies, you'll probably adore this new one.

McGregor is divine as Catcher Block and Zellweger plays her part to pouty perfection.

The inventiveness doesn't work. It's dragged down by Zellweger and McGregor's self-consciousness, as they mug and overact their way through a film whose style relies on lightness of touch.