60
Shot when the director was 91 and finished just before he died in March, Alain Resnais’s third adaptation of an Alan Ayckbourn play is his gentlest attempt at using the artifice of theater to affirm the reality of imagination.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
88
Alain Resnais's overpoweringly beautiful final film dares to push through the ghosts that inhabit the present, standing between the pessimism of an ill-spent past and the optimism of an undefined future.
80
A final opportunity to see a master at work in this mischievously melancholic delight.
63
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
Filmed on abstract sets, it’s full of playful touches, such as lines delivered in front of a screen that looks like a comic-strip panel, and glimpses of a mole puppet popping out from a fake lawn.
100
Everything in Life of Riley, Resnais makes plain, is a contrivance. Much of the joy and beauty of the movie comes from letting the levels of contrivance fall into place, as with some Rube Goldberg contraption, creating a parallel abstract narrative to the more conventional semi-farcical one unfolding on screen.
80
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Resnais's lightheartedness is infectious as he dispenses with the cinematic "reality" he never quite trusted, shooting the six-person farce on obvious sets, with curtains for doors and flat theatrical lighting.
50
Where You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet added layers of meta-reflection to plays (by Jean Anouilh) that are terrific in their own right, Life Of Riley struggles in vain to find cinematic value in one of Alan Ayckbourn’s lesser efforts.
60
A postmodern experiment in both form and function, Life of Riley's rigidity can at times feel like its restricting its actors, leaving them unable to treads the boards with the same authority they would on the stage.
60
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
Life of Riley is neither especially profound nor riotously funny. An element of caricature is palpable in the performances but restrained.