Win Win

Directed by Tom McCarthy

(R)

***

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This new suburban comedy “wins you over, head and heart, without cheating,” said Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. Writer-director Tom McCarthy, who previously created The Visitor and The Station Agent, has a talent for infusing simple stories with the “emotional heft of life as it’s lived.” His third film, starring Paul Giamatti as a floundering attorney who cuts corners on ethics to take on a new client, is “hilarious and heartfelt,” but “with a tough core that repels all things sappy.” The humorous bits are far more generic than McCarthy’s fans might expect, said Peter Debruge in Variety. For the first 75 minutes after Giamatti takes an old man’s money and dumps him in a retirement home, Win Win provides almost zero narrative tension but plenty of “low-key buffoonery.” But all along, Giamatti’s character is quietly redeeming himself by building a relationship with the new star of the high school wrestling team he coaches, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. That’s not generic Hollywood. It’s the work of a director with a “rare ability” to guide his characters toward “gently uplifting outcomes.”