Our Idiot Brother

Directed by Jesse Peretz

***

Hollywood comedies are so much better than they used to be, said Mike LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. Our Idiot Brother “easily could have been mildly funny and phony,” but it’s instead frequently hilarious simply because it’s more “harsh and honest” about human foibles than a rote comedy ever could be. Paul Rudd stars as a “hippie-flavored loser” whose naïve approach to life “keeps colliding with the world around him,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. After he’s released from a short prison stay to discover that his ex has shut him out and taken his dog, the story is simply about the havoc he unintentionally creates as he crashes on the couches of each of his three sisters. But “the details are sharply observed,” and the female performers around Rudd—including Elizabeth Banks, Rashida Jones, and Zooey Deschanel—are all terrific. Still, “the movie wouldn’t work without Paul Rudd,” said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “He has to be nice, but not a fool. Sweet, but not saccharine.” In the run-up to Labor Day, it’s refreshing in itself to find a “hot-weather comedy that doesn’t hate its characters.”

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