✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United Kingdom · 2010
1h 36m
Director S.J. Clarkson
Starring Freddie Highmore, Ken Stott, Victoria Hamilton, Oscar Kennedy
Genre Comedy, Drama, Family, History
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Nigel loves to eat. He dreams of a culinary world beyond the canned food and toast prepared by his mother, who is chronically ill and cannot cook. When his father remarries a housekeeper with a divine lemon meringue pie recipe, Nigel is inspired to pursue his culinary ambitions.
The first-person source material might explain the one-sided account of the struggle, but the film is crippled by its underhanded treatment of Bonham Carter's character, including a healthy dose of unmitigated middle-class snobbery.
Slant Magazine by Andrew Schenker
Joan aside, the film goes down easy enough.
Los Angeles Times by Gary Goldstein
By turns sweet and tart, airy and rich and, above all, a thoroughly irresistible confection.
Sentimental, obvious, but well-nigh irresistible, this jubilant comedy equates England's bland cuisine with its sexual inhibition and suggests we could all use something a little more tasty (at dinnertime, that is).
St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Joe Williams
Toast is lovely to look at, evoking both the gray-green milieu of Midlands life and the sensuality of good food, but it's like a whipped topping with no base.
Like the lemon meringue pies and shrimp cocktails it features throughout, Brit comedy-drama Toast is tasty, hearty and rather conventional.
Based on a memoir by Nigel Slater, a British celebrity chef who makes a cameo appearance, Toast also charts the budding chef's growing interest in hunky, scantily clad guys. Be warned: Some of the regional British accents would benefit from subtitles.
Village Voice by Nick Pinkerton
Slater's book was evidently an ax-grinder, and the resulting film, directed with tone-deaf comic rhythm by S.J. Clarkson, shows pity and bemusement for the people raising Nigel but rarely human interest in them. More damning still, even the food looks ugly.
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
Ms. Bonham Carter's hearty performance makes Mrs. Potter almost lovable. You may laugh at her garishness, but you applaud her pluck and stamina.
I could pile on the cooking metaphors until you cried "uncle," but the fact remains that there's a very good movie in here that its makers have failed to bring off.
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