Invention of Lying Critic Reviews

In its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, The Invention of Lying is a remarkably radical comedy.Read the full review

The performances are razor sharp. And the ideas in this movie are, no kidding, big.Read the full review

Gervais and Robinson take what might have been a cute concept comedy and elevate it to delicious heights.Read the full review

By adhering to the romantic-comedy formula, The Invention of Lying stops short of being truly inventive. But enough sequences are fresh and inspired to make this a comedy honestly worth catching.Read the full review

The film doesn’t traffic in drollery for its own sake. Between laughs, Lying uses its skewed reality to comment on our own need to create useful fictions to wallpaper over the abyss.Read the full review

Ricky Gervais, instead of resting on formula and on a familiar persona, uses his first opportunity as a big-screen actor-director to make an original comedy that expresses some real thinking and feeling.Read the full review

Like Gervais, the audience wants to see a struggle, which here comes down to whether unvarnished honesty or random acts of compassionate deceit will win the day. That alone makes for entertainingly high stakes.Read the full review

While it never tops the explosive hilarity of its first 20 minutes, The Invention of Lying is a smartly written, nicely layered comedy that, like last year's underappreciated "Ghost Town," casts Ricky Gervais as a mild-mannered schlub who manages, in spite of himself, to make the world a better place.Read the full review

For its first stingingly funny half hour, The Invention of Lying had me thinking that Ricky Gervais had finally found a way to bring his indisputable brilliance at TV comedy (The Office, Extras) to the big screen. Then the air went out of the balloon. What a shame.Read the full review