Directed by Richard Curtis
(R)
**
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Fans of Love Actually will probably enjoy the latest rom-com from the same director—if they can stomach a premise that enacts “a creepazoid form of domination over women,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Star Domhnall Gleeson plays a lovably awkward English bloke who on his 21st birthday learns that he has the power to relive past moments, and his use of that talent to woo Rachel McAdams might be cute if he didn’t leave her in the dark for the remainder of their supposed happily ever after. As you might expect, the screenplay eventually begins an “inevitable slide toward tragedy,” said Connie Ogle in The Miami Herald. But director Richard Curtis “pulls off some amusing moments,” and he has “a secret weapon” in the story’s fatherly figure, a “marvelously dry” Bill Nighy. Still, in a film that’s “almost militant in its complacency,” no character seems worth worrying over, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. After two hours in Curtis’s dull, sentimental world, you may wish you could travel back in time, too, if only to “buy a ticket for something else.”
