Critic Reviews

It’s as exhilaratingly honest and unshackled a work as many have come to expect from this auteur of cringe comedy, one that foresees, absorbs, and responds to all possible bile that might be directed its way, knowing full well of the muck it dredges up.

What makes I Love You, Daddy at times frustrating but ultimately enthralling is that the whole picture feels like an exploration — and one where not even C.K. knew where he was going when he started shooting.

I Love You, Daddy is a hilarious, awkward and boundary-pushing comedy about fatherhood, anxiety and the ethics of relationships.

It contrives to be a very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channelling his masterpiece Manhattan and brilliantly finding a fictional way to tackle his personal reputation head-on.

Indulgent and meandering, but also very funny and thought-provoking, this film is ultimately about how little we understand about others — as well as ourselves.

“Zama” and I Love You, Daddy are two of the best movies I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival, which ends Sunday, and they could not be more different or more unwittingly in sync.... A brutally and often uncomfortably funny comedy, it dances around female victimization and male exploitation, and plays with the ostensibly blurry line between the personal and the public. That makes it feel like a near-documentary about the entertainment industry, as well as a kick-me sign pinned squarely on its creator’s white, male, middle-aged posterior.

As a whole, I Love You, Daddy belongs to C.K.’s own peculiar aesthetic, in that it’s brilliantly calibrated to captivate viewers and make them recoil at the same time.

Both in the writing and performance, China is a finely wrought creation, a young lady of manners and a degree of taste but who has been given no guidance, rules, motivation or a stern hand.

Its refusal to over-simplify gives it the structure of a rough cut. Being a grown-up, as far as I Love You, Daddy is concerned, means picking your failures and frustrations; it picks to be too long and poky.

There’s a better, tighter, more emotionally focused movie hidden somewhere in the sprawl of “I Love You, Daddy.” It’s a movie that’s just as rude, funny, and observant as this one but that doesn’t tie itself in knots trying to “say” something.