The People vs. Larry Flynt: Critic Reviews

An exultant comedy of American repression and revolt.

Smart, funny, shamelessly entertaining and perfectly serious too.

Like 12 Angry Men, it's a civics lesson that will still be regaling film enthusiasts four decades hence.

We're really celebrating Hollywood's freedom to create biographies of anyone, no matter how high or low on the social ladder, and still come up with the same banal characteristics, messages and conclusions.

An enormously entertaining and surprisingly touching bio-pic.

Love proves she is not a rock star pretending to act, but a true actress, and Harrelson matches her with his portrait of a man who has one thing on his mind, and never changes it.

Woody Harrelson plays Flynt with energy, and Courtney Love does at least as well as his wife.

One of the truly bizarre careers in recent American cultural life provides the source of tart and tasty amusement in The People vs. Larry Flynt.

Thanks to the light humour, it's consistently engaging; yet minus that darker shading, it's never fully convincing.

The People vs. Larry Flynt is ultimately a worse disappointment than an out-and-out stinker would be, because of its lively, entertaining first half.

You don't have to like the man to support his struggles and enjoy this dramatization of them.

In its excesses and extravagances, its fascination with sex, religion, celebrity, bad taste and making a whole lot of money, there is no more American story than that of combative pornographer and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.

A brave, spectacularly entertaining -- and unexpectedly stirring -- account of Flynt's life that asks us to regard the publisher of Hustler magazine as an invaluable champion of our First Amendment freedoms.

Long after you've grown tired of his escapades, the scenes in which he and Althea support one another against the slings an arrows of outrageous fortune are touching and, ultimately, genuinely tragic.

The movie is a lot of fun for long stretches.

The exploitative misogyny of Flynt's output is never examined, the prurient hypocrisy and intolerance of his persecutors seriously overplayed, plus Larry and Althea's odd romance lacks bittersweet conviction.

I sincerely hope The People Versus Larry Flynt goes all the way and wins the Academy Award.

Funny, fascinating, and maybe just a little unsettling.

Great.

The screenplay, by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, is rich in detail and dialogue.

Proof that you can find patriotism in the most unlikely of places.

The latest movie from the great director Milos Forman is a sensational, irreverent docudrama. And, as they say in the porno trade, it's adult entertainment.

I dug it.

Whitewashing the truth is a forgivable sin in the world of biopics, but to demean ideologies by remaining "balanced" is cowardly.