A Life Less Ordinary

Gloriously excessive, passionate and messy, A Life Less Ordinary is the kind of picture that's becoming more and more of a rarity in the landscape of American movies: a love story with a hard-on.Read Full Review »

The movie damn near lives up to that promise. Picture the Marx brothers and the Coen boys collaborating on a valentine spiked with mirth and malice.Read Full Review »

From start to finish, A Life Less Ordinary feels like a group of sometimes amusing, sometimes clever, and sometimes tedious skits forced to fit together.Read Full Review »

Mr. Boyle's brand of heaven-sent love story comes with a strange and whimsical mean streak. Tender thoughts and ha-ha shootings don't automatically mix.Read Full Review »

There is too much disconcerting and nasty violence in this light-hearted caper, but when it sticks to its romantic guns, it is often charming.Read Full Review »

The film expends enormous energy to tell a story that is tedious and contrived.Read Full Review »

But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting.Read Full Review »

But the result is no more than a forced fable, a self-consciously smarty-pants concoction that is too clever by half and too pleased with itself in the bargain.Read Full Review »

Flippantly hip without any solid laughs, Life strains to be the flick more offbeat. [24Oct1997 pg06.D]Read Full Review »

The new film by the phenomenally talented Scots-English trio of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge -- they did both "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" -- is a failure so absolute and witless it deserves some kind of mention in the Hall of Lame.Read Full Review »