- 9
...[has] so much heart and beauty that one can and should easily overlook its discomfiting moments. The truth is, the film's even more profound and touching upon second viewing...
—Robert Wilonsky Village Voice
- 7
[Director] Johnson's first film, the Hammett-goes-to-high-school noir Brick, was so hard-packed with cleverness it didn't breathe. This time we expect to be played, but the twist is that we're also touched -- which, the film implies, is the cinema's own form of deception.
—Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly
- 6
...the movie equivalent of an elaborate juggling act whose performers keep dozens of pins wheeling in the air. As much as you admire the stagecraft and the technical skills on display, when all is said and done, that's all it is: a fancy, not-quite-two-hour stunt.
—Stephen Holden New York Times
- 6
A perfectly swell caper film that ultimately can't sustain the propelling giddiness of its first hour...
—Chris Barsanti filmcritic.com
- 6
[Director] Johnson sets viewers up for greatness, but ultimately offers much milder pleasures. The film isn't an outright con, but it's easy to feel a little misled by the end.
—Keith Phipps Onion AV Club
- 6
This movie is lively at times, it's lovely to look at, and the actors are persuasive in very difficult material. But around and around it goes, and where it stops, nobody by that point much cares.
—Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times
- 6
...a tad too in love with its own cuteness and it lifts so much from Wes Anderson that a Wilson brothers cameo would seem perfectly at home, but it still manages to be mostly winning thanks to its understated sense of humor and, well, its charm.
—Eric Alt Maxim
- 6
It goes on too long and is a tad too smitten with its own cleverness, but there's much to enjoy in this quirky romantic comedy...
—Leah Rozen People
- 6
...a labored quirkapalooza...
—Matt Stevens E!
- 5
Combining the comic caper film with a calculatedly offbeat, Wes Anderson-inflected brand of drollery, the movie gets both modes wrong, missing the heady thrills expected of the former while failing to establish a sufficiently distinctive comedic sensibility of its own.
—Andrew Schenker Slant Magazine
- 5
None of it hits home as either comedy or drama.
—Peter Rainer Christian Science Monitor
- 5
Imagine Dirty Rotten Scoundrels filtered through the increasingly hermetically sealed sensibility of Wes Anderson, and you've got Rian Johnson's disappointing The Brothers Bloom.
—Lou Lumenick New York Post