Waitress: Critic Reviews

Waitress is a wee romantic charmer, a delectable Dixie screwball romp that never loses its spry sense of discovery.

With Waitress, Adrienne Shelly tamed and shaped realism, finding a perfect, difficult-to-achieve balance of enchantment and plausibility.

You've heard of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. This is My Big Thin White Abusive Marriage.

Though some aspects feel like a sitcom, Waitress doesn't adhere to formula or resort to cliches. It's a rare chick flick that draws us in with its wit, warmth and quirkily appealing characters.

Among the joys here are the supporting players, each with well-defined stories and quirky personalities.

Waitress isn't a great film, but it is great, deep-dish fun, with a generosity of spirit that extends first to the sisters on the screen and in the audience, then to the rest of humanity.

Mildly quirky and zealously cute.

While Shelly's stylized vision and sentimental intentions don't always gel, they do result in a warm, often charming fantasy.

Waitress would stand on its own as a remarkable achievement if you knew absolutely nothing about the woman who made it.

So why does it work, at least much of the time? Because of Russell, and because Shelly's uneven tone also provides hints at brilliance.

An overstuffed, overcooked pie -- too ungainly to eat all of, too generous to pass up, too heartbreaking to contemplate for long.

We can only take comfort in the little slice of heaven she left behind.

Written and directed by the late Adrienne Shelly, it's a scrumptious romantic comedy, a mostly adorable movie from a witty and winning movie talent whom we lost all too soon.

The film isn't averse to reaching for Hollywood fantasies, but there's a lot of what seems to be hard-earned wisdom here about women in bad marriages.

Shelly left her daughter -- and her audience -- a wonderful gift, this movie about the transforming effects of motherhood.

A blissfully daft ensemble comedy.

As sweet as the pies that serve as its central gimmick.

This tale of a pregnant small-town woman caught between a bad marriage and a risky affair is mostly as funny and charming as intended.

In the end, Shelly's script for Waitress has a pleasingly tart undertone that balances out what could have been an overly sugary confection. And she directs with a skill that makes me wish we could look forward to many more films from her.

This bittersweet romantic farce teeters and then tips into precious, a forgivable sin once you know this sweet movie's sad history.

While Shelly's film trades in an especially outrageous form of girl-movie self-consciousness, she's completely sincere when it comes to making her heroine the irresistible repository of our sympathies.

Waitress is not a perfectly cut, factory-line Safeway-brand slice. It does, though, serve up a generous deep-dish portion, homemade and heartfelt, that leaves a sweet taste goes down.

Waitress is sweet, uneven and, ultimately, a heartbreaker.

There are times when the spirit of a movie is enough to get you gliding over its obvious flaws. Waitress, which was directed by the late Adrienne Shelly, is one of those pictures.

A feminist fairy tale about a woman learning to develop her creative gifts while trapped in a stifling marriage, Waitress doesn't need to be subtle or original to hit home.