When I left the theater, I got in my car, turned off my perpetually running radio, and thought for a long time before I moved. It's been a while since a film has done that.
Comment
11/11/06
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
72
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:165
Fresh:119
Rotten:46
Average Rating:6.8/10
Consensus: A fun, whimsical tale about about an office drone trying to save his life from his narrator. The cast obviously is having a blast with the script, but Stranger Than Fiction's tidy lessons make this metaphysical movie feel like Charlie Kaufman-lite.
Runtime: 1 hr 53 mins
Genre: Comedies
US Box Office: $40,137,776
Synopsis: One morning, a seemingly average and generally solitary IRS agent named Harold Crick begins to hear a female voice narrating his every action, thought and feeling in alarmingly precise detail.... [More]
Starring: Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman
Director: Marc Forster
Reviews for Stranger Than Fiction
61 - 80 (sorted by date; Australian critics are listed first)
It's the trippy process of storytelling that counts.
11/11/06
A sweet comedy, an antidote to the over-the-top, vulgar and politically reactionary 'Borat.'
11/11/06
This slightly fantastical, tragi-comic idea ended up in the care of precisely the right people.
11/11/06
[Screenwriter Zach Helm is] called by those in the know “the next Charlie Kaufman...”
11/11/06
Provides a pleasant evening in the theater.
11/11/06
Ferrell proves just the right choice, nicely underplaying for a change and ratcheting up his game opposite major talents.
11/10/06
Will Ferrell is a more than worthy heir to Lemmon, Hanks, Brazil’s Jonathan Pryce and Something Wild’s Jeff Daniels.
11/10/06
Satisfaction comes from the small moments, the simple pleasures. At least, that's the argument Stranger Than Fiction makes — and it presents a pretty convincing case.
11/10/06
A trippy trifle from the Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry school of pop metafiction.
11/10/06
Stranger Than Fiction seems like an old episode of the Twilight Zone, and the idea would have worked better as one of Rod Serling's half-hour epistles on human foibles.
11/10/06
Stranger Than Fiction is both about a novel and like a novel; you eagerly await the turning of the pages.
11/10/06
It doesn't coast on its premise but follows where it leads, which is into some serious territory. What might have been a joke with a tagged-on sentimental ending becomes instead a sensitive movie that affirms the value of life.
11/10/06
Stranger Than Fiction is subversive in its own, low-key way.
11/10/06
Hanging on a high concept never fully supported by its story, Stranger Than Fiction stays aloft thanks to an exceptionally appealing cast.
11/10/06
This movie is to Ferrell what The Truman Show was to Jim Carrey, the film that allows the comic to put both feet on the ground -- and to stimulate a full range of emotions.
11/10/06
Stranger than Fiction would be pretty close to a perfect movie if the ending weren't so weak. Actually, it's still pretty satisfying, but there is a perfect ending out there that surely occurred to Helm, but it is missing in action.
11/10/06
Willfully eccentric, odd in tone, it is an English major's comedy, a wry exploration of plot, narrative, character and a writer's imprint on her or his work.
11/10/06
I loved the little schematic diagrams that track Harold's too-linear existence. Zach Helm's script is very funny and occasionally shocking.
11/10/06
It seems like the screenwriter may have suffered a shortage of ideas and remedied the problem by watching Charlie Kaufman films.
11/10/06
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