The Groomsmen: Critic Reviews

In a film of minor ambition, [the characters are] all worthy company.

Edward Burns paints a scathing portrait of raucous high school buddies clutching at their rock n roll glory days as they push 35.

The Groomsmen may be low-cal Cassavetes or Secrets and Lies for mooks, but Burns knows his turf. The marvel is that after seven films he's still finding fresh grass.

Burns remains an enigma: After six features, it's still impossible to tell if he's a filmmaker with something to say or merely one of the longest-running novelty acts in modern movies.

The Groomsmen captures a single, specific moment, when responsibilities await but adulthood is still unwelcome. If their predicament strikes a chord, you may want to join Burns' boys for their final hurrah.

The movie snaps sharply to life every now and then, and its unfashionable decency really gets to you.

Traffics in such familiar territory as sibling rivalries, generational estrangements and broken dreams. But it slowly, sometimes too slowly, connects with the viewer.

As time goes by, the supposedly everyday middleclass lifestyles effortlessly enjoyed by his regular Joes begin to seem suspiciously like the province of the idle rich.

Instead of whimsy there's nastiness, and instead of promising newcomers there's a cluster of formerly hot actors gone cold.

Edward Burns' best riff yet on guys trying to sort out their feelings about women.

You have to suffer through a lot of down time in The Groomsmen to get to the good stuff.

Writer/director Ed Burns adds a droopy fourth chapter to his Irish-American working class films...

Secure in its indie identity and wholly entertaining, The Groomsmen deserves hordes of filmgoers seeking quality alternatives to the bigger summer pictures.

A standard big-weekend-where- friends-gather-and- everyone-has- a-secret movie.

This is the movie I believe Burns has been trying to make since The Brothers McMullen, 11 years ago.

It appears that as a filmmaker Burns is having as much difficulty maturing as his characters do.

Its realistic portrayal of an almost extinct small-town dynamic between friends and family is not to be missed.

Ed Burns repeats himself in his familiar territory about people who are young and stupid.

The Groomsmen, while as corny as a Staten Island marriage proposal, rings true on many levels.

What this is, is a typical film about nothing, which is what Burns likes to do best.