Crazy, Stupid, Love Actually Quite Smart

Critics largely enjoyed Crazy, Stupid, Love—and some have fallen head over heels for the romantic comedy with an all-star cast.

• In the Los Angeles Times, Betsy Sharkey gushes that the film “may well restore your faith in the very possibility of love, to say nothing of romantic comedies.” The “grand romantic gesture about grand romantic gestures conjures up the bittersweet magic of first loves, lasting loves, lost loves and all the loves in between.”
• "It’s the mild exception that makes, if not for a great movie, then at least for a pleasant surprise," writes Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail.

• “In a time before raunchy, R-rated laffers competed for the how-low-can-you-go prize, the demand for mature, grown-up romantic comedies resulted in pics as wise and wonderfully character-driven as Crazy, Stupid, Love,” observes Variety.
• In the New Yorker, David Denby has his reservations. “The script has many parts in motion, and a fair amount of it works delicately and well,” he notes. But the film “holds to the boring modern convention that good people are inarticulate.”

(More Steve Carell stories.)