The Words Reviews
Top Critic
The story-within-a-story-within-a-story is so slight and inconsequential, like the tiniest of a set of Russian nesting dolls, that we may be forgiven for letting our minds wander toward bedtime and tomorrow's errands.
The premise is ambitious -- if not a little hokey -- but the meager themes of ephemeral authorship and constructed realities aren't exactly revelatory.
Bradley Cooper's funniest movie since "The Hangover" - unfortunately, unintentionally this time ...
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| Original Score: 1/4
This film's layered storytelling lacks the fluidity, grace, or good humour, to pull off its conceit.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This is a film that's thoughtful and elegant, with just enough loose strings to keep things intriguing.
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| Original Score: B
A well-acted but narratively limp indie that's undermined by a failure to connect emotionally with its audience.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
It would have been more fun if I'd brought something to throw at the screen.
Writer/directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal chose to make The Words as bland and obvious as its title, wringing out any subtlety or artistry.
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| Original Score: 2/4
"The Words" is a decent, ambitious, unoriginal film about a decent, ambitious, unoriginal writer. Both aim for greatness. Both fall short.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A clever, entertaining yarn that doesn't bear close scrutiny.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The Words founders on a spurious dichotomy between love and art.
I had planned to watch it, but there's nothing to see.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It reinforces the misconception that great works arrive in a burst of creativity brought on by a tragic love affair, ideally in Paris.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Even with one story line and time frame too many, the movie conjures a mean Faustian bargain and leaves a classic dramatic question hanging in its air: What would you do if faced with similar circumstances?
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| Original Score: B+
While it's no chore to watch so many appealing actors, it does feel like something of a waste to see them hemmed in by such flat material.
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| Original Score: 2/5
For the most part, it's an adequate romantic drama orbiting an intriguing moral dilemma, but the decision to use a three-layered approach to tell the story makes little sense from a dramatic or narrative perspective.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Witlessly titled and executed...
As good looking but shallow as its multiple leading men.
The problem is with the three nested stories themselves, which...are treacly variations on what a not-too-inventive Nicholas Sparks enthusiast might imagine to be Hemingway-esque.
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| Original Score: 2/5
The fatal flaw of this screenwriting term paper is that Cooper's character is a boring jerk we're supposed to regard as a nice guy who made an honest mistake.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The Words is a movie about writing and books made by people who apparently rarely read.
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| Original Score: 1/4
You wish it were better than it is, simply because nobody ever makes literary thrillers these days.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It becomes preoccupied with exploring its fiction vs. reality theme and connecting the dots of its many plot strands at the expense of character development.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
What do we learn? That it's bad to steal the work and identify of other people. For this we need an oh-so-serious movie?
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| Original Score: 2/4
I enjoyed the settings, the periods and the acting. I can't go so far as to say I cared about the story, particularly after it became clear that its structure was too clever by half.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Another actor might have made us feel something complicated for this troubled soul, but Cooper merely looks like the kind of guy who would steal another man's story.
A lush but fumbling literary melodrama outfitted with an attractive, generations-spanning cast and a puzzle box of three competing narratives.
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| Original Score: 3/5
"The Words" leaves nothing to the imagination, smothering all these storylines in narration that spells out the actions we're seeing or emotions we could infer for ourselves.
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| Original Score: 2/4
By the time a grizzled Jeremy Irons saunters in, ready to dole out a comeuppance, perceptive viewers will have mentally flipped to the last page.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
A literary film that stands to work best for those who don't read.
