Feast of Love: Critic Reviews

Feast of Love, Robert Benton's bobos-in-love ensemble drama, adapted from the Charles Baxter college-town novel, is far too cloyingly pleased with its own humanity.

Playing a canny old papa bear dispensing nuggets of advice to a flock of unruly cubs in Feast of Love Morgan Freeman has a role he could act in his sleep.

If it's a choice between cleaning out the shed and seeing this - opt for the shed.

Multiple narratives are fluidly interwoven and the writing is often inspired, resulting in dialogue that feels honest and insightful, if occasionally mannered.

Feast of Love is [Benton's] easiest movie to like since 1994's Nobody's Fool, and it's immediately homey.

For a film that purports to be an epic consideration of Love in Our Time, Feast is strikingly unthoughtful and uninterested in any but the most obvious kind of romantic love.

All the couples have palpable chemistry, and Kinnear and Freeman seem so convinced they're in a respectable movie that they actually make it one.

At one point he tells a love-struck friend, 'I think I'd proceed with caution.' I'd proceed just as cautiously to the movie.

Director Robert Benton and screenwriter Allison Burnett tell a sobering, adult-geared tale of love's highs, lows and maddening twists and turns.

Benton has made better movies about doomed marriages (Kramer vs. Kramer), but this one has no organic reality.

This feast is more like an artfully arranged appetizer plate.

This heart-warmer by Robert Benton has some of the tender wisdom and humor of his other features.

As a meditation on the vicissitudes of love, on the need for people to connect, and the struggles that come by both making and missing those connections, the movie is wading-pool deep.

A bit too involved and convenient at times, but still classy and heartfelt all the way.

Pretentious and precious.

An exquisite tapestry of interlocking love stories, some of which end happily, some sadly, some farcically and one quite tragically. Throughout all the shifting moods, no single narrative disrupts the well-paced flow of the film as a coherent whole.

Given the potentially unwieldy nature of the enterprise, [director] Benton juggles the multiple narratives with considerable grace, and succeeds in creating a warm (if somewhat improbable) sense of community among the principal characters.

You can see better stuff on TV any night of the week.

[Director] Benton has a gift for casting, even if it is "on the nose" (actors almost too perfect for the part). Kinnear is at his most endearing, and Freeman, shorn of his flintiness, has never been sweeter.

Director Robert Benton finds an emotional through line in a format that might have easily broken down into a series of disconnected anecdotes with little to nourish us.

There's an occasional scene that works -- a funny sequence where Bradley bargains for his dog with a kid -- but as the movie progresses, the melodrama is piled on with a bulldozer.

The screenplay combines philosophy, melodrama, and cliches to engaging effect.

While things occasionally get a little soapy around the edges, the encroaching melodrama is masterfully held at bay by [Morgan] Freeman, whose scenes with [Jane] Alexander are exceptionally moving.

It's like Friends without the funny. Oh, wait -- that's redundant.

The script weaves three interlocking stories in unlikely ways and relies on random acts of violence, fate and God for dramatic complications that the characters aren't fleshed-out enough to whip up on their own.