Knocked Up Reviews
Top Critic
Ultimately the film says that fate has a way of kicking you up a notch, if you can somehow let yourself rise to the occasion.
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| Original Score: 5/6
The year's best comedy; one that confirms the arrival of an extended group of talent that looks set to take the studio comedy crown from the likes of Ferrell, Stiller and Carrey.
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| Original Score: 5/6
Knocked Up isn't going to help change the world or anything, but at the very least it may help take one's mind off the relentlessly dismal headlines. I don't know what greater service a mere movie can perform these days.
A refreshingly frank, funny odd-couple comedy with engaging leads and too many belly laughs to count.
Hilarious from moment to moment, but leaving behind both a warm glow and a sting. This is a picture that refuses to fetishize either the ability to conceive or the significance of our place in the universe once we've done so.
What makes the movie so winning are its endearing and relatable characters who spout believable dialogue and amusing banter, steeped in clever pop-culture references and sharp observations of human nature.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Knocked Up is a different kind of movie, a refreshing mix of the whip smart and the heartfelt.
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| Original Score: 4/4
It's hard enough to find comedies like this at any time, so it's a small and welcome miracle to come upon one in the midst of a typical movie summer, richer than ever in over-budgeted, underwhelming inanities.
It's a very funny 90-minute movie, trapped in a 129-minute movie that has many, many dead spots and unfunny patches.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Apatow shows how a comedy should and can be more like life, without sacrificing a laugh.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Apatow's dialogue is so good, the undercurrent of his story so inherently sweet, and the performances so engaging, that you surrender immediately.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
What ultimately makes the film so satisfying is the seriousness and affection with which Apatow treats his characters, no matter how drug-addled or misguided they may be.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
While Apatow's movie isn't perfect, it's still a fumbling and funny valentine to the shock of pregnancy, the reality of love and the chaos of all that comes after.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Look at what else is playing in multiplexes across North America at the moment and, if you can find a film that entertains and touches as effectively, give us a call.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Knocked Up is full of huge laughs and witty pop culture banter but also offers insightful and honest explorations of marriage, relationships, friendship and parenthood.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Even if it goes on past full-term, it never seems like labor: more like a big bungle of joy.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's a very simple movie that ends up making room for some invitingly complex ideas.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Knocked Up is half goofball guy-movie and half sentimental chick-flick, and it works on both levels, even if it does overstay its welcome.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The 40-Year-Old Virgin and his new Knocked Up make writer-director Judd Apatow today's preeminent creator of low-concept sex comedies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It may be a bit, um, premature to say so, but Judd Apatow's Knocked Up strikes me as an instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment.
| Original Score: 5/5
Judd Apatow's high-density, high-intensity comedy of bad (and good) manners is a cause for celebration -- the laugh lines are smart, and they come faster than you can process them.
It's not that Knocked Up is misogynistic -- if anything, Apatow is uxorious to a fault, scrupulously respectful of chicks and the chick stuff they do. He just doesn't seem to get exactly what that stuff is.
Apatow's marriage of guyville and girlworld is not one made in heaven -- he's too pragmatic to observe the rom-com conventions. What's potent about Knocked Up is its down-to-earthiness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Apatow's gleefully raunchy movies are, in an odd and charming way, extremely family-friendly.
I doubt you'll see a funnier movie this summer than Knocked Up. Apatow has clearly earned the unusual mantle of chief chronicler of modern family life in all its profane glory.
Sweep aside the gross-outs and you've got the family values comedy of the year.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Funny, honest, and generous, this is mainstream American comedy at its best.
Apatow's awfully sharp as a chronicler of contemporary romantic anxieties.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
If you want to hate on Judd Apatow's Knocked Up -- and the anti-crowd-pleaser contingent will surely ding it -- then get ready to be drowned out by the sound of laughter from the rest of us.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
An era-defining comedy classic to rank with Little Miss Sunshine. It's this generation's When Harry Met Sally, and it's even better than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, because the freakish situation it uses as a setup is life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Knocked Up is so enamored of Ben and his insouciant charm that it fails to wonder what it must feel like for the girl.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Knocked Up turns out to be not just rude, crude and outrageously funny but a deceptively sophisticated meditation on moral agency -- with pot jokes!
Knocked Up positions itself as this summer's 40 Year Old Virgin. But it's actually this summer's Jersey Girl, a tone-deaf skip down parenthood lane for a generation that grew up on bong hits, blogging and supposedly safe sex.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Grownups, your summer smash has arrived.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The comedy often feels like voyeurism -- a bunch of really funny guys (and girls) invited us over to hang out with them for the weekend.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Two hours and small change seems like a lot for any movie comedy to ask of its audience. But it's hard to imagine how much Knocked Up could shed from its baggy frame without diminishing its roughhousing charms.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
More than just laugh-out-loud funny. It's the relationship comedy of the summer and likely the best boy-meets-girl movie of the year.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Knocked Up is comic chicken soup for the Colbert Nation soul.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
The likelihood of [director Judd] Apatow turning into Chris Columbus or Ron Howard seems refreshingly slight.
Except for being a bit on the long side -- which you won't mind because you'll be having too much fun -- it's pretty close to perfect.
Judd Apatow is making the freshest, most honest mainstream comedies in Hollywood.
Apatow is clearly a romantic, even if there's a profane edge to his 'love conquers all' worldview. Other filmmakers embarking into the comedy minefield could learn a thing or two from him. He's two for two.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a sincere meditation on adulthood, accountability, and fidelity -- and, yeah, getting high.
Knocked Up feels very now. The banter is bruisingly funny, the characters brilliantly childish, the portrait of our culture's narrowing gap between children and their elders hysterical -- in all senses.
Knocked Up is uproarious. Line for line, minute to minute, writer-director Judd Apatow's latest effort is more explosively funny, more frequently, than nearly any other major studio release in recent memory.
