Avis Metacritic

This is more “Something Mild” than “Something Wild.” But Firth and Blunt handle their characters’ many revelations with care and play with layers of hurt and disappointment with great sympathy and pathos.

[A] sweet, semi-romantic road trip.

The way Firth embodies the character, with a robot stare and a flat affect that expresses each thought as a kind of minimalist hologram of emotion, he's playing a cipher who pretends to be a different cipher. How indie-ironic!

Throughout Dante Ariola's film, the expressions of the false-identity theme are multitudinous, and about as subtle as the Colin Firth character's choice for a new last name.

Uncourageously, the plot gets a case of cold feet, looping back to half-written family members left in the dust. But when it’s being wild, the drama has nearly enough character to pass for distinct.

Two lost souls on the highway of life — that’s what a well-acted but benign little trifle called Arthur Newman is about.

Firth and Blunt make a strange couple, and Ariola a musicvideo helmer making his feature debut, should have devoted more time to making the chemistry work than to sustaining the melancholy mood.

Fun for a bit, things soon turn silly.

This is not the stuff of stirring humanist drama, but rather a bland scenario about boring people that want to mature but have no idea how.

The flat-out dullness of Arthur is the point of Dante Ariola's debut feature, but it's also its undoing.