Margot at the Wedding: Critic Reviews

As the ambivalent title guest in Noah Baumbach's pleasurably painful domestic drama Margot at the Wedding, Nicole Kidman is so unlikable as to be spectacular.

When it comes to emotional violence, Margot at the Wedding is hard to beat.

Humourless (though supposedly a comedy) and pretentious, almost a parody of the self-indulgent Sundance festival film, right down to the washed-out colours, droning dialogue and the title in big sans-serif capitals.

A parade of uninteresting characters cruelly betraying one another without motivation.

Margot at the Wedding is a broader work than Baumbach's last movie, and it's funnier, too, even as you gasp at the misbehavior.

This blast of homecoming claustrophobia is being released for the holidays, when it may prove therapeutic. Bring the family. Or better yet, leave them.

Margot has no sense of balance, or nuance, or even mitigating psychological weight.

See the movie if you like emotional car wrecks and people who can't hold their mud.

Margot is sensually as well as dramatically impoverished.

The characters are into emotional laceration for fun. They are verbal, articulate, self-absorbed, selfish, egotistical, cold and fascinating. They've never felt an emotion they couldn't laugh at.

Baumbach's achievement stings. It also has the sureness of tone and direction of a Chekhov story.

Apart from John Turturro in a cameo, all the characters are monsters and/or basket cases.

The defining metaphor of Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's dysfunctional-family seriocomedy, is a battle-scarred Volvo with faulty brakes.

If you enjoy seeing people at their passive-aggressive worst, the verbal sword fights between the sisters will tickle your black heart.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach solidifies his standing as the modern bard of American dysfunctional families with Margot at the Wedding, but at the same time he's recycling material he's already covered, and covered more exquisitely.

Margot at the Wedding is an excellent film that few people will see, and even fewer will like.

Only an actress of Ms. Kidman's stature, talent and proven magnetism could make her mercurial character bearable and watchable for the full 91 minutes of the film, in which she is in almost every scene.

Margot at the Wedding provides ample evidence of just how low Noah Baumbach has sunk.

Margot at the Wedding is a circus of family neuroses and bad behavior that perhaps a therapist could make sense of better than Noah Baumbach can.

I've had root canals that were more enjoyable than Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's hugely pretentious, ugly and annoying follow-up to The Squid and the Whale.

There isn't a pleasant, wholly likable character in the cast. But you can't avert your eyes from it.

There's no question Baumbach has a way with words and actors (Kidman, Leigh and Jack Black are terrific).

Kidman's Toxic Narcissist Drives Bracing 'Margot at the Wedding'

These characters don't seem illuminating at all -- just damned annoying and, ultimately, dead boring.

It's bad enough that the movie is about uninteresting people's problems. What's worse is that it's about snobs, and Baumbach buys into their snobbery.