70
Cheating flagrantly, helmer Michael Winterbottom has pulled off the trick -- sort of -- with the wickedly playful Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
90
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
This is not just a movie-within-a-movie, but a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie, something that sounds unbearably arch but that is swift, funny and surprisingly unpretentious.
70
For all the on-set antics, appropriated Fellini music, and throwaway gags, the movie is most successful when Coogan is pulling faces for the mirror, aimlessly trading Pacino imitations with his sidekick Brydon, or riffing on the color of the latter's teeth.
80
A successful mix of literary adaptation, meta-fictional discourse and inside-showbiz comedy. Both funny and clever.
100
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
The first great, mind-tickling treat of the new movie year.
75
Has about a dozen layers of in-joke, and up to the eighth or ninth layer, they mostly work.
75
Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer
It's all a bit precious and preening, but Coogan is marvelous, almost as good as he was in Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People."
75
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
It's really inventive and bizarre and marvelously entertaining.
80
This may seem too inside-cricket for a U.S. audience. And it's true that Cock and Bull is so postpostmodern, it's very nearly postmovie. But it's no less diverting for all that. It would be a shame if the great novel no one has read becomes the terrific film nobody bothers to see.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden
Long deemed unfilmable, the 18th century novel finds the perfect interpreters in director Michael Winterbottom and actor Steve Coogan.