For Your Consideration: Critic Reviews

Truly, the level of tender, ruthless, inspired, lethally accurate study that has gone into the follicular expression of each and every character in Christopher Guest's latest hilarious cultural corrective is something inspiring to behold.

For Your Consideration is by far the broadest comedy Christoper Guest and company have made. Despite its merriment, it is also the flimsiest.

The comedy is very unsubtle, and huge swathes of screen-time are given over to Fred Willard as a presenter on a dumb entertainment TV show - funny, yes, but not funny enough to justify the vast amount of time he is given.

Hollywood is rife for satire, but it's been done before.

[The film] may contain as many riffs on ego, self-deception and corporate greed as Guest's directorial debut, but it also possesses something rarely seen from the director: a shocking degree of unforgiving misanthropy.

Despite the dead fish floating in this latest barrel, the potshots in For Your Consideration do add up to a knowing jeremiad against the maddening phenomenon of awards-season hype.

Hoopla in Hollywood isn't the real subject here, merely the pretext for another oddball ode to lovable losers.

... Christopher Guest's aim in For Your Consideration is hilariously accurate.

While that title raises expectations for delicious humor, what we see of the movie itself is foolish and flat.

Inside the awfully good comedy For Your Consideration is a purely awful drama, dying to break out.

Even more welcome than a new Bond is a new Guest.

In order to stay ahead as a mocker these days, you must nail your subject for good.

Much of the movie just counts on its audience saying, 'I don't know what kugel is, but that sure is a funny word.'

Enough happens in show business margins of the Hollywood milieu depicted in For Your Consideration, in which Coolidge shows up as a bubbleheaded producer, to make up for a somewhat soft center.

By now Christopher Guest's brand of satire has become so formulaic that it hardly matters that he disposes with the pseudodocumentary format this time.

Individual scenes come across as amusing, but Guest loses comic momentum when he shifts between the shooting of the lachrymose Home for Purim and the segments lampooning entertainment media.

Considering the talent involved, For Your Consideration is a letdown.

[Director Christoper Guest] finds the absurd (and shares in the discovery with his cast) but always sees some human, tender truth behind the laugh lines. As a result, For Your Consideration is certainly worth your consideration.

For Your Consideration won't win an Oscar, but it probably will win some adulation from hard-core Guest fans.

The theory of comedy that applies here is that even the most talented people in the world cannot turn back the clock on an outdated concept.

[It] works chiefly because they continue to simultaneously embrace and condemn the cruel superficiality of their self-absorbed losers.

Guest and his co-writer, Eugene Levy, aren't afraid to chew off the hand that feeds them.

Fans of Guest's brand of repertory-company character comedies will find a few reasons to grin. But even the fanatical will have to admit that this one is hardly worth considering.

... a winningly successful movie about abject failure.

The target is way too easy and the tone far too smug.