Funny People

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Funny People is a true brass ring effort, a reach for excellence that takes big risks. It's 146 minutes, with a story that's more European in feeling than American.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Turns out to be one of the most absorbing films of the year. Plus it has lots of wiener jokes.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Funny People nimbly intersperses humor and reflection. It is a rumination on mortality, fame and life choices, punctuated with Apatow's trademark raunchy humor.

TV Guide Perry Seibert

The result is a raucously funny and poignant love letter to standup comics.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The thing about Funny People is that it's a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances -- and it's ABOUT SOMETHING.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

It's the work of a major talent. Apatow scores by crafting the film equivalent of a stand-up routine that encompasses the joy, pain, anger, loneliness and aching doubt that go into making an audience laugh.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Even the most forced, artificial episodes in Funny People ring oddly true, because George's life -- the obscene wealth, the loneliness, the fame -- is odd. Perhaps not since "Sunset Boulevard" have the wages and eccentricities of celebrity been depicted with such tough, almost perverse honesty.

The New Yorker David Denby

Apatow’s richest, most complicated movie yet--a summing up of his feelings about comedy and its relation to the rest of existence.

Empire Mark Dinning

An absolute treat. In spite of its disappointing climax, this is Apatow’s smartest, rudest and -- yes -- funniest film yet.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams

The sharpest parts of the movie hack through the Hollywood jungle with an insider's certitude. But Apatow is so grounded in the comedy circuit that he can't quite capture the emotional wavelength of the life-and-death drama.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The movie's power sneaks up on you, reminiscent of something screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond once famously described as "the Billy Wilder touch": A combination of the sweet and the sour, because even funny people, like you and I, aren't always being funny.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Funny People turns out to be fairly predictable, and not so rough. In a thoroughly satisfying way.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

It's refreshingly unformulaic, but a rambling mess. It's also tremendously funny.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Apatow is on the right track. In moving his adolescent male comedies into more adult realms, the humor sharpens and characters deepen.

Chicago Reader Cliff Doerksen

Messy but engaging comedy.

Film Threat Matthew Sorrento

Perhaps Simmons is the man Apatow fears he will become. If so, with Sandler's help the filmmaker's fashioned a solid work of self reflection. There's plenty to love and laugh along with here.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Not quite funny enough, or serious enough, falls into the muddle middle.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

Funny People – sensitive, shaggy, a little bit draggy – is as much about the maturation of Ira as a performer and George as a man as it is about Apatow’s maturation as an artist.

Premiere Staff (Not credited)

The drama aspect is necessary to the story, but it just drags on too long.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The movie wears thin its welcome a couple of reels before Apatow has finished telling his story.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

It's got a smattering of hearty laughs and a career-high performance from Sandler.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

50 percent good and 50 percent close.

Slate Dana Stevens

Apatow answers to no one. His worst enemy as a director is his unwillingness to linger in the dark places from which his comedy springs.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Amusing and engaging yet lacking in snap and cohesion, this insider's look at the world of standup comics in contempo Los Angeles rings true in its view of the variously warped, stunted and narrow lives of its mostly male denizens.

Village Voice Scott Foundas

There's so much that's so disarmingly good and sharp about Funny People that you wish the whole movie weren't so much of a shambles.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

You find yourself wishing that Apatow had managed a script that was either really funny or about real people instead of this half-baked pseudo-memoir that's neither.

Time Richard Corliss

That heart comes bursting out of Funny People, Apatow's intermittently engaging, 2 hr. 26 min. essay in schizo-cinemaphrenia.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Michael Posner

Apatow wants to be taken seriously. Funny People is the attempt to raise his game a notch – and it fails.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Sandler isn't afraid of plumbing his dark side, but Apatow fails him: Scenes of George's self-pity drag on too long, and as the character loses stature, Sandler recedes from his own vehicle. Rogen doesn't fill the vacuum.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

What’s best about Funny People, actually, is Sandler, who takes the weird, resentful anger that has always coursed beneath his comedy and puts it right on the surface.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The message that comes across is: We're all screwed, and then we die. Ba-DUM.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

There’s something irritatingly self-satisfied about Funny People, which explains why, though it glances on the perils of fame, it mostly affirms its pleasures.

Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Any sort of new insight into comedy's darker themes, to say nothing of life's, eludes Funny People. Instead Sandler and Rogen and the rest are left to wander aimlessly, with tedious comedy gigs, an even more tedious faux sitcom and relatively vapid relationships masquerading as a plot.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Funny People is an ambitious, misshapen picture that feels like two, maybe even three, separate movies uncomfortably jammed into one.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

Gets old fast.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The denizens of Judd Apatow’s Funny People have been pulled every which way to fit a misshapen concept, yet they remain painfully unfunny, and consistently off-putting.