Directed by Michael Winterbottom
(Not rated)
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
As a road trip should, this charming British import plays as “part plan, part improvisation, part fun, part irritation,” said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. Comic actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing themselves, perfectly capture the split personality of travel, then go one step further by creating a brilliant portrait of competing egos. Disgruntled with his Hollywood career, Coogan has accepted a newspaper assignment to review various fine restaurants scattered across the English countryside, and he takes his friend Brydon along. “The result is occasionally repetitive,” said David Germain in the Associated Press. But all is redeemed by the duo’s rapport, as Brydon’s self-assured joviality perfectly offsets Coogan’s insecure-diva act. The two friends often interact through impressions, imitating everyone from Michael Caine to Woody Allen, said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. Their “extreme virtuosity” with this underappreciated art provides more than just diversion. It supplies a “vaunting thrust of fanciful wit” to a film that otherwise might not be worth the detour.
-
Fannie Flagg’s 6 favorite books that sparked her imaginationFeature The author recommends works by Johanna Spyri, John Steinbeck, and more
-
Google: A monopoly past its prime?Feature Google’s antitrust case ends with a slap on the wrist as courts struggle to keep up with the tech industry’s rapid changes
-
Patrick Hemingway: The Hemingway son who tended to his father’s legacyFeature He was comfortable in the shadow of his famous father, Ernest Hemingway
