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.
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05/12/06
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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006)
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Reviews Counted:30
Fresh:28
Rotten:2
Average Rating:7.9/10
Consensus: 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.
Theatrical Release:Jan 27, 2006 Limited
Box Office: $1,110,155
Synopsis: Barely stopping to breathe between productions, outrageously prolific director Michael Winterbottom follows his graphically intimate 9 SONGS with the raucously entertaining TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK... [More]
Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson
Director: Michael Winterbottom
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Reviews for Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Top CriticA 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.
03/10/06
Top CriticA 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.
03/10/06
Top CriticProbably 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.
03/02/06
Top CriticTristram 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.
03/02/06
Top CriticA highly amusing combination period film and mockumentary.
02/24/06
Top CriticTristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is an eccentric hoot of a film, a delight for lovers of nattering British comedy. Or the business of moviemaking. Or just deadpan, postmodern silliness.
02/24/06
Top CriticEven if you don't get all the inside jokes, and the jokes that go inside the inside jokes, I still think you'll find this film to be very, very funny.
02/21/06
Top CriticThis material is the most remote from the letter of Sterne's novel, but in its spirit of verbal play, digression and free-wheeling wit, it pays affectionate tribute to his bawdy jokester spirit.
02/17/06
Top CriticA sly, delirious homage to the writers, producers, techies and thespians who assemble with the common mission of telling a tale, and then, many months and meltdowns later, move on to the next project -- and paycheck.
02/17/06
Top CriticIt feels made up on the spot, in the mockumentary style Winterbottom and Coogan deployed in their Manchester music-scene goof, 24 Hour Party People. But that film wasn't half as much fun as this one.
02/17/06
Top CriticBeneath the fun lurks a dry and weary sigh at life's refusal to match the tidiness of art.
02/17/06
Top CriticIt's pretty funny. You don't actually watch it so much as indulge it and admire its cleverness.
02/16/06
Top CriticIt wonderfully evokes the life on a movie set, which for a few weeks or months creates its own closed society.
02/16/06
Top CriticFor a movie about movies, it's surprisingly humanistic, cheerful and true to life.
02/09/06
Top CriticOne trouble with the current vogue for meta-cinema is that its practioners, such as Winterbottom and Charlie Kaufman, underestimate the extraordinary difficulty of telling a good story straight.
02/07/06
Top CriticGiven the strength of the talent and material here, it's still a workable compromise for fans -- and a confusion Tristram himself would understand.
02/02/06
Top CriticIt is a sign of the film's success that extraneous moments are essential to a film that is, essentially, nuts.
02/02/06
Top CriticWith a subject seemingly so amenable to heartless derision, the film is remarkable for its warmth and generosity and conviviality.
02/02/06
Top CriticThe movie's delights unfold like an intricate, exotic puzzle: Winterbottom has built a detailed, miniature universe inside a sugar egg.
01/27/06
Top CriticLatest News for Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
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