Reviews
The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“Another rom-com with brains. Why are we being spoiled? Does America think it can slip out these thinking comedies in the silly season without being noticed? ”
28/06/2012
Read Full Review
The Times
Kate Muir
“The rom-com’s trajectory is inevitable, and overlong, but the humour is often squirmingly spot-on, when not scatological. ”
29/06/2012
Read Full Review
The Observer
Jason Solomons
“This is a concept romcom, rather than a "meet cute" and it plays out with a bantering wit, piquantly observing the Manhattan dating scene and recapturing the freshness the sitcom Friends once had. Jason and Julie even live in the same apartment building, in separate flats, and while Westfeldt so clearly owes a debt to Diane Keaton's Annie Hall, I couldn't help but think how their living arrangements have more of a Woody and Mia ring to them.”
01/07/2012
Read Full Review
The Daily Telegraph
Tim Robey
“Friends with Kids takes a real subject – wanting children before it’s too late, not being in a suitable relationship – and has half an adult stab at it, until it takes the one turn you’re hoping it won’t. ”
29/06/2012
Read Full Review
Time Out
Cath Clarke
“Purely platonic, no benefits… you can see where this is headed. ”
28/06/2012
Read Full Review
Total Film
Jonathan Crocker
“And sure enough, Friends With Kids develops with an uncomfortable mixture of keen observation and forced falsities. Westfeldt is cute but disappointingly weak, Scott is cocksure but too dorky to play a player. He effortlessly pulls Megan Fox. Westfeldt swans around in immaculate Manhattan fashion. But as people, they’re selfish, silly and not very real.”
20/06/2012
Read Full Review
The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
“Fans of Mad Men’s Jon Hamm may be disappointed, because for most of the film he’s a marginal figure. Then, while on holiday with all the other couples, his character has a drunken confrontation with Jason about his unusual style of parenting with Julie, and the reality he faces with his current girlfriend (Megan Fox). It’s a powerful moment that gives the film the serious backbone it badly needs. ”
01/07/2012
Read Full Review
The Independent on Sunday
Nicholas Barber
“When Harry Met Sally with nappies. ”
01/07/2012
Read Full Review
Empire Magazine
Helen O'Hara
“Any film about upper-middle New Yorkers needs to work harder to stand out. If you’re travelling between Manhattan apartments and skiing lodges, the emotional issues should be that much more complex and better explored to keep our sympathies, or it’s just a stream of first-world problems.”
26/06/2012
Read Full Review
The Los Angeles Times
Sheri Linden
“Westfeldt's screenplay reaches for the rat-a-tat-tat of screwball. Occasionally she achieves it, thanks to a gifted cast ... But the interactions can also feel forced. Infant diarrhea and fraught nerves notwithstanding, these are seamless lives, where babies are rite-of-passage accessories. The biggest problem, though, is that for all the daring of Jason and Julie's social experiment, essentially they're just another rom-com couple, oh so crazily complicating their path to that longed-for clinch.”
09/03/2012
Read Full Review
The New York Times
Jeanette Catsoulis
“Like the girly sitcoms currently speckling the television schedule, Friends With Kids comes fully equipped with jokes about vaginal elasticity and other formerly unmentionable female concerns. As limiting in their way as the football-watching, belly-scratching preoccupations of the sitcom man of yore, these quips have become de rigueur in a certain kind of entertainment directed primarily at women, badges of progressiveness that often serve only to veil the retrograde themes lurking behind them.”
08/03/2012
Read Full Review
The Scotsman
Alistair Harkness
“What dooms the film, though, is not the aching predictability of Julie and Jason’s can-they-really- remain-friends? dynamic (after all, When Harry Met Sally traversed similar territory with brilliant results); it’s the fact that the film revolves around such monstrously narcissistic protagonists. There’s almost nothing likeable about the neurotic Julie or the smug Jason that makes you want to root for them. They’re shrill, annoying, staggeringly dull and much less interesting as characters than their friends. The last of these problems may simply be down to the fact that Hamm, Wiig, Rudolph and O’Dowd are much more appealing performers than Westfeldt and Scott, but the few moments when the film manages to come alive tend to be scenes involving them rather than the stars.”
28/06/2012
Read Full Review
The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
“Where Bridesmaids was filthy and (at times) laugh-out-loud funny, Friends With Kids is filthy and — despite some clever dialogue — not very funny. And if you can’t predict how this movie will turn out, you should get out more.”
29/06/2012
Read Full Review
The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
“There’s no mistaking the smugness that veils the whole enterprise, without any hint that other worlds and values may lie beyond the city limits.”
12/03/2012
Read Full Review
The Independent
Anthony Quinn
“It's an interesting idea for a while, though Westfeldt's writing isn't as adorable as she thinks it is and Scott's Jason is every bit as smug and annoying as you think he is.”
29/06/2012
Read Full Review
The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“This agonisingly unfunny and charmless grownup relationship movie [that] is so phoney it made all my teeth hurt and caused my sinuses to feel as if they had been filled with radium.”
28/06/2012
Read Full Review