The Upside of Anger: Critic Reviews

Costner and Allen show you what it means not just to play a role but to inhabit it.

The upside of Mike Binder's deeply flawed attempt to marry midlife romantic comedy with domestic farce is two nearly perfect performances by Joan Allen and Kevin Costner.

Showy and door-slamming but very watchable.

Allen is one of the most reliable American actresses, and her intelligence and wit raise the quality of a movie that often feels as if it belongs on the Lifetime cable network.

What's best about Upside is its gonzo-sitcom craziness, a situation that lends itself to enjoyable performances.

It feels like a retread of several better movies, with a nastier, more bitter edge.

Binder is too facile an observer to get anywhere near the complexities of a house full of women -- instead, Terry is a prickly goddess, and the daughters are an assortment of muses.

The film has exhausted itself with fits of glib hysteria long before its truly stupefying final twist, a stunning betrayal of audience trust.

A wonderful, sophisticated romantic comedy about the resilience of love in the face of competing emotions.

Allen gets to the heart of the movie's humor without ever winking.

I liked these characters precisely because they were not designed to be likable -- or, more precisely, because they were likable in spite of being exasperating, unorganized, self-destructive and impervious to good advice.

Allen and Costner get to flirt and fool around and distract us from the rest of the movie. They're doing it a favor.

This is a movie that rests on its two leads. Allen and Costner play their parts like injured predators licking each other's wounds. They are magnificent, and they are healing.

The film is full of emotional truth, and it gives Allen, at long last, the star vehicle she so richly deserves.

One seriously enjoyable film, filled with laughs and recognizable situations and people you might know or like to know.

It feels like a bloated Lifetime TV movie.

An emotional reality check that is profound, laugh-out-loud funny, articulate and shattering.

This is no Terms of Endearment.

Perfectly adult, perfectly acted and perfectly adorable, it surprises and charms for most of those 90 minutes.

Standard-issue.

Binder wrote this movie for Joan Allen, and it is her flinty performance that gives the undertaking what claim it has to success.