Avis Metacritic

Stranger than Fiction is a wonderful cinematic experience - a welcome way to spend a chilly autumn evening.

When Ferrell and Hoffman do their thing together, a charming bit of whimsy becomes something more. It becomes really, really funny.

This is a Ferrell you've never seen before, nailing a role that calls for breakneck humor in the final race against the clock and touching gravity in the love scenes with Gyllenhaal.

Sometimes becomes too self-consciously clever, and it doesn't entirely resolve its own central dilemma. But it remains inventive and funny to the end, features fine performances from Will Ferrell and especially Emma Thompson.

A more sensitive Ferrell in a script that plays like Charlie Kaufman Lite: that should send up breakthrough and Oscar signals. It doesn't quite, though. The movie is clever, but a little too pleased with its own clockwork intricacy.

Teems with ideas both literary and existential, which might make it unbearably precious, were it not redeemed by woozy charm and some serious acting from Will Ferrell.

A good movie but not a great one, Stranger Than Fiction is reminiscent of the films of Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) but lacks that writer's conceptual rigor and imaginative power.

An eminently easy-to-watch piece of one-joke pop japery, is a movie that mimics the I'm-a-character-in-my-own-life metaphysical playfulness of "The Truman Show."

Like Jim Carrey, Ferrell seems to think that the way to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor is to drain himself of everything that audiences love about him.

Stranger Than Fiction merely layers whimsy upon whimsy. As written, Harold Crick is no more convincing a human being than he is an IRS agent; Kay Eiffel's writing, supposedly good enough to inspire the career-long devotion of a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman), sounds as dully declamatory as movie-trailer narration.