Up in the Air: Critic Reviews

Up in the Air is light and dark, hilarious and tragic, romantic and real. It's everything that Hollywood has forgotten how to do; we're blessed that Jason Reitman has remembered.

An assertively, and unapologetically, tidy package, from its use of romance to instill some drama into the narrative (the book introduces disease instead) and the mope-rock tunes that Mr. Reitman needlessly overuses.

There's nothing too profound here, and yet it works well as a smart, light cosmopolitan comedy: it's a snack, rather than a meal, but expertly made.

Timeliness can be tricky to pull off convincingly in movies. It's tough to capture an era while it's still happening, yet Up in the Air does so brilliantly, with wit and humanity.

Up in the Air is a timeless movie that's utterly of its time -- a movie of humor, heart and mind.

Up in the Air is actually several good movies -- a workplace comedy, romantic comedy, and family comedy -- seated on the same flight in the same aisle. They all feel forced together.

Like Juno, Up in the Air conjures a troubling reality and then wishes it away.

A lovely Hollywood romance that floats buoyantly along on a sea of sadness.

How often can you fault a wonderful comedy for an excess of humanity or plausibility?

Few recent films have been so adroit at looking outward while burrowing inward.

From taxi to touchdown, Reitman knows how to get us to the next destination.

... it goes a long way to renewing our faith that movies can tackle grown-up comedy resonant with real-life dilemmas and tragedy, often beyond our ability to grasp or control.

Clooney -- slim, dark, perfectly tailored -- glamorizes insincerity in a way that makes you want to go out and lie.

The tension between the bleak and the blithe, the prime source of this movie's strength, is sustained by Reitman to the end.

Up in the Air takes the trust people once had in their jobs and pulls out the rug. It is a film for this time.

Up in the Air has been shaped for Clooney's prodigious, slightly melancholy charm as a comic leading man. Happily he has worthy sparring partners.

Reitman deserves credit for going through with a bitterly ironic ending, but the movie is marred by its warm condescension toward flyover country.

I don't know if it's the best movie of the year, but it's the most utterly enjoyable.

It would be easy to make Ryan a louse or a hero who just needs a bit of armor polish. Clooney makes Ryan both ruthless and sympathetic.

Director Jason Reitman brings such splendid balance and nuance to Bingham's story that you can't hate the man; indeed you end up pitying him.

Up in the Air often looks like an American Airlines commercial, and I wouldn't call it a feel-good movie per se, but there's a certain satisfaction watching two snappy, beautiful people at the top of their form.

A slickly engaging piece of lightweight existentialism highlighted by winning turns from George Clooney and Vera Farmiga.

The pitch-perfect direction by Jason Reitman perfectly balances comedy and drama.

Jason Reitman's dry, moving "comedy," based on the Walter Kirn novel, is a sly indictment of Corporate America, Marketing America and Frequent Flying America.

George Clooney has never seemed more vulnerable or more in tune with a role than he does in Up in the Air, a film that will be hard to beat for Best Picture come Oscar time.