Puccini for Beginners Critic Reviews

Brainy and balmy.Read the full review

It all looks easy when it's carried off this smoothly. But as any number of stilted duds can attest, applying a Philip Barry or Woody Allen sensibility to 21st-century New Yorkers in their 30s is as delicate a craft as diamond cutting.Read the full review

The plot, which spins around Allegra's lovers having just been an item, is awkward bedroom farce, but the tone is Woody Allen-meets-"The L Word," with a patina of literary cuteness that now seems like the sound of a vanished Manhattan.Read the full review

If Woody Allen were a young, attractive gay woman, he might make something like this, or so Maggenti hopes. But it would probably be funnier, and it would definitely cut deeper.Read the full review

Bisexuality certainly increases the geometric possibilities of the romantic comedy, completing its triangles and allowing for quadrangles and other, more amorphous layers of amorous involvement.Read the full review

While it tips its hat to screwball comedy, Puccini for Beginners owes more to contemporary sitcom. It also has way more in common with "Sex and the City" than "The L Word." None of that is entirely a bad thing in a film that never really soars but has enough breezy humor.Read the full review

Maggenti is still trapped behind surfaces, enamored of the IDEA of making a buoyant, urbane romantic comedy, while falling short of anything really resonant or personal.Read the full review

Puccini for Beginners is literate and sensitive, characterized by witty dialogue and smart, emotional two-person encounters.Read the full review