Average Rating: 7.5/10
Reviews Counted: 122
Fresh: 110 | Rotten: 12
Though Laurence Sterne's novel was considered more or less impossible to successfully adapt to film, director Michael Winterbottom has done it in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, by making movie about the making of the movie. Stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon add madcap, knowing performances to the mix, and the result is a fun, postmodern romp, before there was any modern romp to post.
Average Rating: 7.9/10
Critic Reviews: 33
Fresh: 31 | Rotten: 2
Though Laurence Sterne's novel was considered more or less impossible to successfully adapt to film, director Michael Winterbottom has done it in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, by making movie about the making of the movie. Stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon add madcap, knowing performances to the mix, and the result is a fun, postmodern romp, before there was any modern romp to post.
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Average Rating: 3.3/5
User Ratings: 21,939
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A group of actors and filmmakers set out to adapt an "unfilmable" classic novel -- but find that their own petty concerns get in the way -- in this satirical comedy. Laurence Sterne's 18th century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman told the story of its priggish title character from the moment of conception onward, with a bevy of digressions, distractions, and unfinished anecdotes. In adapting the work for the screen, director Michael Winterbottom chose to stay true to its
Oct 7, 2005 Wide
Jul 11, 2006
$1.1M
Picturehouse
All Critics (130) | Top Critics (35) | Fresh (113) | Rotten (12) | DVD (10)
Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is a hall of mirrors that doesn't tease the brain (it's easier to watch than to read about) so much as goose it into submission.
[Michael Winterbottom's] goofy, messy version of Tristram Shandy puts the Fellini back in 'Fellini-esque.'
A Cock and Bull Story is a grand giggle of a film, well worth your time and money and a game well played for the audience.
A hilariously clever picture about the making of a movie that no one will have the slightest interest in. For an experiment about an experiment, it's entirely too much fun.
Probably the best-known but-I-digress novel in English literature, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, has inspired Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, surely the best but-I-digress movie this side of Adaptation.
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story brims with humor, from a Monty Python-type take on British colonialism to a winking send-up of the film's star, Steve Coogan.
A typically rambling, freewheeling effort from Michael Winterbottom...
Director Michael Winterbottom may not have proved that you can film this unfilmable book, but he definitely proved he can film a funny movie about trying to film it.
Coogan and Brydon make a beautiful squabbling couple
Equal parts literature and lunacy.
The movie is witty, engaging, and above all, intelligent, even if the story is all cock and bull.
For those who can appreciate the movie's ironic, self-referential nature, this is a thoroughly engaging, near-brilliant comedy.
If you go into this movie expecting a traditional narrative tale, you may get discouraged. You have to throw away your expectations and sit back and wait to see what happens ... if anything.
A successful mix of literary adaptation, meta-fictional discourse and inside-showbiz comedy. Both funny and clever.
[O]ne of the cleverest deconstructions and modernizations of a work of classic literature cinema has ever achieved...
...Preposterously funny, perpetually inventive, implausibly successful...
Having seen and fell in love with The Trip first, it was fun to spend more time with characters that I had come to know and love. On top of being a smart and layered film, Coogan and Brydon continue to give the audience their patented witty passive-aggressive banter. While I did not find myself sick with laughter in
April 15, 2011Super Reviewer
When did British comedy become boring? My guess. Sometime around this film's release. There's an average human drama subplot, but the rest is pretty stuck up [their own a***] comedy.
July 15, 2007Super Reviewer
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