Irina Palm Reviews
Sydney Morning Herald
Scenes and characters are half-baked, merely a means to propel Maggie's character to her final flowering.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Let's Not Listen
An alleged story of determination and empowerment, about the lengths -- and girths -- a formerly timid dowager will go to in order to save someone's life.
Top CriticIt could have been a delicately witty comedy of manners.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Although director and co-writer Sam Garbarski takes great care in tracing this difficult dramatic path (he has to balance the twin tracks of other people's morality and Maggie's personal course), he can't avoid the predictability.
Slant Magazine
Excuse me while I wash down the film's nasty aftertaste with some Broken English.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Even if there aren't many other reasons to give this contrived and too often silly film a chance, Faithfull makes a captivating leading lady.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Tonally all over the place, pic is built around a would-be humorous script, but jiggery lensing and gloomy lighting suggest helmer Sam Garbarski is under some delusion that he's making a slice of gritty realism with romantic undertones.
Film Journal International
A perverse male fantasy masquerading as an earnest story about a woman's life-altering experience.
Oregonian
At first blush, it seems like another entry in the saucy-but-safe Brit genre, a la Calendar Girls, Saving Grace or The Full Monty, but it turns out to be both more ambitious and less successful than those diversions.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
takes the notion of risqué empowerment a few preposterous steps further.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Guardian [UK]
A gobsmackingly awful British film -- awful in the way that somehow only British films can be: our TV drama, of whatever quality, is never as creaky, naive, badly written and flatulent as this.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
NewsBlaze
A thought-provoking drama, which arrives in a timely fashion, given these dire days of skyrocketing medical costs and a governor caught consorting with high-priced call girls.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
New York Press
There's little new in terms of the plot's bold strokes. But the details and minutiae keep Irina Palm fresher than it would have been otherwise -- along with Faithfull's low-key performance, turning her rasp from jaded to shy.
Director Sam Garbarski must like his early Neil Jordan and Stephen Frears, since Irina Palm plays like a throwback to gritty-but-softhearted English dramas of the 1980s like Mona Lisa and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
NewsBlaze
Garbarski combines social satire, hand jobs, feminism, and romantic grace to create a tenderhearted tale of found love and female empowerment. And he actually pulls it off, give the guy a hand. On second thought...
KPBS.org
Irina Palm is a showcase for Faithfull but it never truly allows her to shine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
