Friends with Kids

An indelibly funny and touching comedy with a real sting in its tail. The laughs leave scars.

Friends With Kids cheerfully earns its R rating on language alone, but always in service of a good laugh.

Like an acquaintance couple's baby pictures, Friends With Kids induces coos but isn't as cute as they think.

The movie looks like every other rom com, all spacious apartments and sleek, woodsy vacation homes, but it takes you through a wider range of responses to the relationships and characters than most.

Good chemistry between the lead actors and nice supporting performances help Friends With Kids survive a formulaic story and just-OK filmmaking.

A smooth but frustrating third feature with an extremely good ensemble cast.

It's shrill in tone, awash in unexamined narcissism - kids are just pretexts for laughs, rather than objects of love - and afflicted by explosive verbal diarrhea. There's simply no base line of normal human activity, let alone intimacy, until the anticouple finally re-examines their anticommitment credo. By then everyone has been so selfish and dislikable that our commitment to the film is lost.

An incredible film, is funny, emotive, ingenious, the cast is amazing, and the performance of Megan Fox is wow, amazing, I never believe that. Friends with Kids is abig sorprise.

A fresh take on raising a child in an unorthodox way. The film distracts us with vulgar language and awkward moments between characters. The lead characters perform well and keep us involved but, the main downfall is the unneeded dialogue of vulgarity.

The cast is great, even if slightly under used at times, and the screenplay has its highs and lows. At its highs it's a smart and heartfelt comedy. At it's lows its an awkwardly crass, and predictable romance.

The movie starts out promising but falls flat. There is not a scene in the movie that is not predictable. There are also some anti-religious statements thrown in that do not further the plot but just serve as a way for the writer (and star) to push their own liberal views.

The film loses its rhythm when it explores their romances. Jason (Adam Scott) and Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt) have quirky, earnest conversations about sex, life, and death--they talk about choosing between different ways of dying; getting eaten by an alligator vs. a shark, for example. They play off one another like a comedy duo, and this is where the film's chemistry and laughs reside. But once the films shifts direction towards the budding romances of their rival love interests Mary Jane (Megan Fox) and Kurt (Edward Burns), the film fizzles. MJ and Kurt are introduced late in the film, and are types rather than individuals, which generates little tension for us in dual love triangles. While Fox feels more natural in her scenes here than she does in her previous work, she doesn't have enough to do, especially compared with the subtext Westfeldt give herself in her own scenes, where she pretends she's happy that the Jason character has found someone. Furthermore, Friends with Kids has more characters than it can handle (a maid character is introduced and then dropped from the narrative). There's a squabble between an extraneous couple at the film's climax, yet they had so little screen time heretofore that it comes out of the blue. Who are these people and why should we care if they're fighting? Westfeldt doesn't understand that just because the characters know each other doesn't mean that we do