Metacritic-Rezensionen

Late Night smartly sends up not just the cloistered world of late night television, but a current cultural climate struggling to evolve in a changing world.

What makes Late Night — otherwise a largely predictable story in a familiar mold — really pop is Kaling’s script, which is at the blunter and frankly more exciting spectrum of what Kaling has proven herself to be capable of in her writing career thus far.

Late Night is going to wind up being one of the best comedies of 2019.

The combination of Thompson’s sharp delivery and Kaling’s commercially friendly script make the film’s charms hard to resist.

It’s a genial, funny movie, not a mile-a-minute behind-the-cameras gag-fest (hyphens!) like 30 Rock, but an amiable workplace comedy that finds personal definition in its influences.

The rapport between Thompson and Kaling, along with the entire supporting cast, make Late Night a lively and entertaining workplace comedy with its finger on the pulse of today’s entertainment industry.

Diverting and for the most part agreeably amusing, Late Night is about as mainstream and conventional a movie as could be made right now about the timely issues of women and minorities finding equal footing in the workplace.

Arguably the film’s biggest problem is that it’s less laugh-out-loud hilarious and more deserving of the odd casual smirk.

When Thompson and Kaling are playing off each other, Late Night sings. That so much of it is focused elsewhere feels like a miscalculation.

Thompson delivers a memorable performance as the abrasive “cold witch,” as someone describes her, perhaps even outdoing Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wars Prada as a delightfully wicked woman of power.