70
Village Voice by Amy Nicholson
A Perfect Day is a wry salute to the hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers of the world, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
The New Yorker by Anthony Lane
So acclimatized are we to action flicks, and to onscreen conflicts teeming with soldiers, that it’s refreshing to find a film that concentrates on hanging back and reversing out of harm’s way.
63
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare.
60
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
While it's uneven, A Perfect Day builds to a nice melancholy conclusion. It underscores with gentle strokes the frustration and disillusionment of self-sacrificing workers confronted on a daily basis with feelings of futility in the face of corruption and compromise.
60
Inconsistency is A Perfect Day’s biggest problem. The script is scalpel sharp in some places, flabby as the well-blocker in others.
60
By the end, thanks to Leon de Aranoa’s steady direction and the actors’ slow-building character work, “A Perfect Day” manages to coalesce into a reasonably tough-minded, compassionate vision of the difficulties and rewards of trying to do the right thing in an intractable situation, though the film has to overcome more than a few flat, indolent stretches to get there.
70
Screen International by Lee Marshall
The humanity of the enterprise, hovering between sympathy and ironic detachment, keeps the script on course, delivering a story that for all its motley-band-of-brothers clichés feels as authentic as many more pious takes on the Bosnian conflict.
50
The Playlist by Oliver Lyttelton
The humor is there on paper, but it ends up emptily quippy and gag-filled rather deriving the jokes from situations and character, and only one in three end up landing, mostly thanks to Robbins.
60
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
When the film gets going, it’s hard not to be bustled along with it, thanks mostly to León de Aranoa’s talent for punchy comic dialogue – doubly impressive, given this is his first English-language picture – and the plot’s habit of thwarting your expectations as to where the most morally upstanding course of action might lead.
75
New York Daily News by Stephen Whitty
Director de Aranoa keeps things moving, though, with a firm sense of pace and a rough, punk-edged soundtrack.