Playing By Heart: Critic Reviews

For all its artificiality, Playing by Heart percolates with an earnest charm.

[It's] n tune with the current trend toward movies that coddle the audience with reassuring sentiments.

This charming romantic comedy with a Los Angeles setting cuts between seemingly unconnected miniplots the way some Robert Altman movies do.

Carroll's characters spend so much time talking, albeit intelligently, that the connections they make seem peculiarly synthetic.

As a young scenemaker who keeps landing in one bad relationship after another, Jolie doesn't exactly avoid the pitfalls of the material she's given. But her performance is flabbergasting.

The movie is consistently well-acted and features a gallery of characters so affable that it's difficult to actively dislike any of them, or, for that matter, the film as a whole.

If Playing by Heart is the kind of film that used to be known as a "woman's picture," it certainly provides more emotional nourishment than most other mainstream movies generate these days.

The brightest spot belongs to Angelina Jolie, who is so compelling to watch she has chemistry with the furniture.

All of these characters are more interesting when things are going badly for them than when the tide has turned, and Carroll's determination to make the final reel an extended bout of audience tummy tickling is disappointingly conventional.

A very slight and inoffensive movie. It's a lot like L.A. itself, all surface, soothing and warm.

Playing By Heart tries hard and sometimes succeeds -- and Jolie is terrific.

Nothing more than merely watchable film.

The dozen or so lead characters of Playing By Heart fear silence the way Biblical people feared locusts.

An underrated, dreamy drama about love, lust and infidelity amongst inter-connected Los Angeleans. Jolie rises to the challenge.

The lack of time gives the last reel a fakey, tied-up-with-a-bow feeling, but good performances and a good script make this an enjoyable little romance.

An intriguing patchwork of relationships converges into a portrait of modern love in Playing By Heart, a wry, satisfying emotional saga.

A heavily mixed bag; high points come with Jon Stewart's sweet courtship of Gillian Anderson and a brilliant turn from a young unknown named Angelina Jolie.

The script's overall artifice, combined with a convenient burst of "I love yous" and an all-too-obvious surprise ending, work to undermine an otherwise interesting concept.

Willard Carroll's cleverly interconnected (sometimes annoyingly so) tale of six different relationships is populated by a horde of big-name stars...

A well-scripted ensemble drama about eleven people in Los Angeles searching for love.