Crazy, Stupid, Love

Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa

(PG-13)

***

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This “winningly sentimental” ensemble comedy just might “restore your faith in the very possibility of love,” said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. Julianne Moore and Steve Carell star as a long-married couple whose sudden split inspires the wounded husband to take pickup lessons from a swinging bachelor while fending off the attentions of a teenage babysitter. Because Moore is having an affair and her character’s 13-year-old son has eyes for said babysitter, multiple story lines about the quest for romance are soon bouncing up against each other. “The strength of the movie—however formulaic its structure—is that it is slightly more thoughtful about its characters” than most light summer fare, said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. It allows them to have “real feelings, even some that surprise them.” Crazy, Stupid, Love could easily have offered a dark, satirical take on romance, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Besides its skilled cast, “what makes it worth watching, and worth liking, is the sense that it arrives at its warm and comforting view of things” not simply to abide by Hollywood’s rules, “but by choice.”