Thank You for Smoking: Critic Reviews

It is a thinking man's comedy that is intelligent enough to look at all sides and make fun of everyone equally.

[Thank You For Smoking is], for better and worse, as uniformly rolled as a machine-made Marlboro.

Glibly funny and eager to please, the film version of Christopher Buckley's novel Thank You for Smoking is not unlike the down-and-dirty habit of its title.

There's enough bite in the dialogue and performances to provoke a hacking cough of approval, and the laugh-out-loud moments are many, not least in scenes featuring Rob Lowe's unctuous Hollywood agent.

That quirky and intelligent rarity that elicits wry smiles and hearty laughs alike.

Filtered too heavily with moral redemption.

Like its protagonist, the movie is smart, soulless, glib, and utterly charming -- just the thing to warm up a movie season that's been late to bloom.

It's an under-flogged axiom of American business -- if only Jason Reitman's movie had more muscle in its whip arm.

One of the most entertaining riffs on American culture in years.

Literate and smirky in its assault on liars and fools across the map.

A fun, smart film. But you can't help but wish Thank You would bare its fangs a little more.

The book had a fearlessness that the movie version so lacks.

Even the good lines here last a self-congratulatory beat too long.

Eckhart, in a sure-handed performance, holds the picture together.

Here is a satire both savage and elegant, a dagger instead of a shotgun. Thank You for Smoking targets the pro-smoking lobby with a dark appreciation of human nature.

Besides being the best American comedy since The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Thank You For Smoking is the first film in a long time with a true gift of gab.

The story of Thank You for Smoking resides in that libertarian netherworld where the far left and the far right march shoulder to shoulder.

[Jason] Reitman makes an amazingly confident feature debut. Thank You for Smoking is funny stuff.

To watch the film is to feel the delicious discomfort of being seduced by a devilish charmer.

In the end, Nick and the world in which he traffics ends up a comic interpretation of a serious situation, and while the amoral ambiguity of the entire film is intriguing for a while, in the end you realize this patient has no pulse.

It's a lot of fun.

What makes the movie curiously timely is its emphasis on the process of spin as opposed to the moral content of what is being spun.

An entertaining satire on contemporary morality that skewers corporate spin culture, political correctness and that most rhetorical of concepts in Bush's America, personal freedom.

Despite many funny bits, Thank You for Smoking is ultimately too nice.

Deliciously nasty, naughty satire.