Trust the Man: Critic Reviews

Don't hate them because they're beautiful. On second thought, go right ahead.

Opening a film with a small child straining on a toilet and talking about poop isnt just a bad idea; its an invitation to unfortunate metaphor.

This comedy about two self-absorbed New York couples feels like wan Woody Allen.

With its self-conscious literary references and trendy settings, Trust the Man quickly begins to feel hopelessly derivative of other, better movies.

Is this farce, drama, satire? Who knows?

[The] characters don't mean anything because they don't say anything or do anything that feels rooted in the nitty-gritty of the everyday.

In the end, you're left feeling a little empty, as if you've been eavesdropping on a conversation in a restaurant and neglected to eat your dinner.

I wish the film were true to itself and its quartet of puzzled, struggling lovers; their collapse into sitcom idiocy felt uncomfortably close to betrayal.

Screenwriter and director Bart Freundlich fails to offer fresh insights into the problems of contemporary relationships, and many of his comic targets are easy and conventional.

Trust the Man could easily carry the following subtitle: Men Who Behave Like Petulant, Spoiled Children and the Women Who Decide It's Easier to Love Them As-Is Than To Try to Turn Them Into Grownups.

I saw this at a festival and hated it, then sat through it again a year later and decided it wasn't so bad, aside from the god-awful ending.

The people behind this film would not recognize complex, honest emotion if it hit them in the face with a frying pan.

There's nothing terribly wrong with this comedy about the romantic dalliances of four New Yorkers, but there's nothing terribly right about it, either.

Unfortunately in this New York, no crisis is insurmountable, and no upscale downtown restaurant is deprived of product placement.

As faux Woody Allen movies go, Trust the Man is one of the more diverting recent entries in the genre, with a top-drawer cast, well-chosen Manhattan locations and a sharper script than Allen himself has managed in a while.

Two couples in trouble, one with kids, another considering them. Writer-director Bart Freundlich's challenge is to stress them and find a resolution to their conflicts in ways that aren't banal, predictable or witless. And he settles for one out of three.

A romantic comedy by design, a form of torture in practice, and an atomic-strength antidote to the romantic impulse in effect.

Like a few too many of this year's adult offerings, this one is a diversion. It's not unpleasant, but it doesn't offer a 'must see' night at the movies.

A smart, sharply observed, highly affable look at contemporary relationships that finally injects a little life in the stagnating genre.

For all the promise of a cast led by Julianne Moore and David Duchovny in an urbane, adult chronicle of love and marriage, the movie just strings viewers along through phony contrivance, like any other romantic comedy.

The actors gamely keep up their spirits, but the male characters are too one-dimensional and the female characters too bizarrely divorced from reality to be at all engaging.

"Trust The Man" is an agreeable New York-centric romantic comedy about two couples on the brink of self-destructing.