Stranger Than Fiction: Critic Reviews

There's no denying the movie has a surface allure.

While Stranger Than Fiction traffics in a bit of darkly funny existential anxiety, it also finds room for romantic fantasy and sentimental uplift.

Screenwriter Zach Helm's comedy has some quirky points, but it's very sugary and sentimental, and feeble compared to the work of those who have done the same sort of thing better: Woody Allen or Charlie Kaufman.

Besides being inventive and witty, Stranger Than Fiction is a tribute to the power of literature. But art is not its only domain. It also delves into the world of ultimate certainties: death and taxes.

It's not the original story we signed up for -- or thought we did.

Stranger Than Fiction is uptight. [Writer Zach] Helm is clearly pro-love and happy endings, but he's short on loose, fresh ideas.

[The] performances succeed where Harold fails: gaining a life independent of their author.

It has a nifty premise and outstanding performances from Ferrell, as the protagonist-in-progress, and Emma Thompson, as his blocked creator.

For all of the film's narrative intricacies, it's love in bloom that carries the day.

Stranger Than Fiction might be film, but it moves like a novel: a literate, unhurried tale marked by softly wrought reflections on the self-made life.

Yes, Stranger Than Fiction is a head trip. But it's a very friendly one, and well crafted at that.

Will Ferrell delivers a moving and surprisingly delicate -- though not so surprisingly funny -- turn as the lonesome bureaucrat bedeviled by a voice only he hears.

Stranger Than Fiction is a meditation on life, art and romance, and on the kinds of responsibility we have. Such an uncommonly intelligent film does not often get made.

The deader the deadpan the better. When Ferrell and Hoffman do their thing together, a charming bit of whimsy becomes something more. It becomes really, really funny.

Take a cool premise, a smart director and a top-flight cast, then throw an ex-TV sketch comedy knucklehead into the mix - and voila, a thinking person's dramedy that grapples with issues of fate and free will, love and liberation. Look out, Oscars.

There's no joy in seeing Ferrell play an office drone, and the life lessons he learns are of the "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" variety.

A wondrously funny modern fairy tale, Stranger than Fiction manages to blend romance, satire and fantasy into a story that's both fully satisfying and patently absurd.

If Stranger Than Fiction has a central flaw, it's overly sentimental. Although the story would work better as a tragedy, Forster and Helm can't resist tacking on a mushy love story, involving Crick and combative tax cheat Ana Pascal.

A film well worth seeing and savoring.

It remains inventive and funny to the end, features fine performances from Will Ferrell and especially Emma Thompson, and offers enough to enjoy and dispute to make it a good B.O. attraction.

With its musings on free will and God, the story may not be original, but caring about its hero is automatic for the audience. That's more than most movies can say.

Willfully eccentric, odd in tone, it is an English major's comedy, a wry exploration of plot, narrative, character and a writer's imprint on her or his work.

Stranger Than Fiction seems like an old episode of the Twilight Zone, and the idea would have worked better as one of Rod Serling's half-hour epistles on human foibles.

So, in lieu of the usual cookie-cutter movie, we at least get the cookie itself, a nice-light treat.

The picture is an overworked trifle: There's so much going on in it that it becomes hard to care about anything that's going on in it.