Music and Lyrics: Critic Reviews

As Hugh Grant ages, something is becoming clear: The actor's most compelling attribute is not his floppy forelock but the vein of charming self-loathing that has always been pulsing under his masterfully mussed-up hair.

Music and Lyrics aspires to nothing more than the competent dispensing of mild amusement and easy emotion.

Grant and Barrymore make a reasonable odd couple, and both have charm, but this never comes to life.

Despite dragging in the last third, the movie works as a light and frothy confection for an enjoyable Valentine's Day treat.

I don't think the ending is up to the rest of the movie, but Grant and Barrymore are great together, and the movie has both zing and song.

In the end, the movie's just the kind of enjoyably empty-headed fluff it celebrates and mocks.

Writer-director Marc Lawrence foists upon his film a rather preposterous meet-cute that renders a promising premise about comebacks and rare second chances predictable and innocuous.

Grant is as smarmily sarcastic as ever, but Barrymore constantly pulls him back. Despite her record number of bad role choices, she may be the warmest comedy actress around, and you can't help rooting for her.

When the movie zooms in on their fruit-and-nutcake relationship, it's adorable, too.

The movie is as disposable as the music in it. But movie theaters need filler, too -- and this is the best kind.

Light, sweet and agreeably confident

Drew Barrymore is that rare movie starlet who can handle the comedy end of romantic comedy, but she coasts through her underwritten role as a goofy plant sitter recruited by Grant to write his lyrics.

More substantial than a sugary treat, this crunchy rom-com with Hugh Grant as a has-been popster and Drew Barrymore as a never-was poet (they collaborate on a hit song) is simply irresistible.

A satisfying scoop of audiovisual comfort food. Expect more and you have no one to blame but yourself.

Every Valentine's Day should be blessed with a confection as fluffy, light and satisfying as Music and Lyrics, a date movie filled with laughs and tunes and nothing too terribly serious to say.

Music and Lyrics will make you want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

After the plethora of alleged comedies we've been getting lately, this feel-fine rom-com with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore is a perfect warm-hearted, heart-shaped antidote to the winter blahs.

The amusement inherent in watching Hugh Grant play a washed-up '80s boy-band pop star angling for a comeback provides Music and Lyrics with its catchy hook.

Too bad director Lawrence tends to hit you over the head with the jokes in his script.

If Music and Lyrics were a song, you'd have to say it doesn't have a good beat, though it is easy to dance to.

What Grant lacks in credibility as a lover he makes up for in eagerness to please. He wickedly skewers the music of the 1980s -- he sings! he dances! -- while at the same time reminding us of the cruel reality of disposable pop stardom.

Most of the musical numbers, including the central song, are unexpectedly catchy and believable. Thanks for that goes to songwriter Adam Schlesinger of the band Fountains of Wayne.

If there's one thing Music and Lyrics understands, it's the apparent effortlessness of a good pop song, the way, particularly on a bad day, it can seem like a gift floating down from the heavens.

[It] won my heart for what it didn't do: all the moments it could have strained for farce or confessional self-disclosure, and instead turned its attention back to the problem at hand.

The movie fails to achieve a position in the top echelon of romantic comedies, but it resides high enough in the pecking order to be worth a look by anyone with a penchant for the genre.