Love Liza: Critic Reviews

This is a nicely handled affair, a film about human darkness but etched with a light (yet unsentimental) touch.

Despite Hoffman's best efforts, Wilson remains a silent, lumpish cipher; his encounters reveal nothing about who he is or who he was before.

Louiso lets the movie dawdle in classic disaffected-indie-film mode, and brother Hoffman's script stumbles over a late-inning twist that just doesn't make sense.

Largely this sad story is handled with a morbidity and monotony that go nowhere -- certainly not toward understanding.

It is a warm, perceptive study of people who do curious things.

There is a kind of attentive concern that Hoffman brings to his characters, as if he has been giving them private lessons, and now it is time for their first public recital.

Louiso has a confident touch and a good eye, and there isn't a scene in the film that wasn't intelligently done.

A showcase for an actor's actor rather than as a drama that engages our hearts.

This is a film that succeeds on the strength of its acting, which is uniformly brilliant.

Hoffman is understandably concerned about typecasting, but he is indeed the man for the job, recalling the intensity that Nicholas Cage brought to an Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas.

A picture as erratic as its central character.

This isn't an uplifting nor a profoundly memorable film, but it's honorable and honest enough to face a truth that Hollywood movies rarely deliver: that life sometimes deals us injuries from which we never recover.

Indie icon Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a strong performance that elevates this minor film (written by his brother) above its narrow scope and small-scale production; inexplicably, it won the Sundance Film Festival's Jury Screenplay Award.

A bela performance de Hoffman e prejudicada pelo roteiro irregular, que o obriga a passar por mudancas subitas e inexplicaveis, como se a necessidade de arrancar lagrimas do espectador fosse maior do que o interesse em buscar coesao para a historia.

Lays grief on with a thickness that smothers.

Love Liza is a festival film that would have been better off staying on the festival circuit.

Love Liza doesn't leave us with redemptive speeches or somber homilies but with a hard-earned sense of something moving down deep, below the apparent emptiness

Pointless claptrap that wastes those fine performances in service of a story that's all too predictable.

Hoffman's performance provides the emotional release his brother's script and Louiso's direction try to deny us.

Despite the film's bizarre developments, Hoffman keeps us riveted with every painful nuance, unexpected flashes of dark comedy and the character's gripping humanity.

The film skillfully taps into the desire to watch the slow burn in its entirety.

Hoffman is a terrific character actor.

It comes the closest to any movie experience I've had in re-creating the aftermath of unexplained suicide.

Hoffman's unfettered performance beautifully captures Wilson's sad, manic quality.

Philip Seymour Hoffman carries the piece and makes what might have been an otherwise unbearable film oddly gratifying.