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| Told with wit, genuine poignancy and all kinds of humor, Venus charts the unlikely relationship between a man in his 70s and a young woman more than half a century his junior. |
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| (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times) |
| A sublime meditation that is one of this year's wisest, warmest and funniest films. |
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| (Kyle Smith, New York Post) |
| Venus belongs to O'Toole. This is, hands down, my favorite performance of the year, largely because I love the way O'Toole (and the filmmakers) refuse to yield to the all-too-pervasive idea that it's "icky" for old people to even think about sex. |
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| (Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com) |
| A heartbreaking comedy that is simultaneously funny and sad, raunchy and sweet, funky and elegiac. These fresh, unexpected juxtapositions are a specialty of the writer Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette), a sworn enemy of cliche. |
| (David Ansen, Newsweek) |
| Peter O'Toole, looking frail beyond his 74 years, gives what may be his farewell performance as a leading movie actor in Roger Michell's Venus. It's one for the books - and maybe the Oscars, too. |
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| (Jack Mathews, New York Daily News) |
| Peter O'Toole, still a British cinematic lion at 74, performs another movie miracle in the Roger Michell-Hanif Kureishi film Venus. |
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| (Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune) |
| Venus is rollickingly funny at times - but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness. |
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| (Ty Burr, Boston Globe) |
| The great thing about Venus - apart from its sharp eye for the daily routines and drab details of senior citizenry in a buzzing metropolis - is that it isn't soppy, or sentimental. |
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| (Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer) |
| O'Toole is frail and probably won't make many more movies. So Venus is pitched partly as a fond farewell to a beloved artist, and his whole beautiful generation. |
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| (Noel Murray, The Onion) |
| The screenplay is by Hanif Kureishi, who wrote The Mother for Michell and also scripted the classic My Beautiful Laundrette. He has a feeling for outsiders. |
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| (Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor) |
| Awash in terrific performances. |
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| (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal) |
| Since the movie is about desire - not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide - it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi's knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination. |
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| (A.O. Scott, New York Times) |
| Maurice, the protagonist of Venus, is a suit lovingly tailored to O'Toole's ravaged but commanding frame. |
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| (Jim Ridley, Village Voice) |
| Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi take a deeper, edifying interest in the moral ambiguities that arise between Maurice and Jessie. And thanks to our warm investment in both characters, we're more than willing to sign up for this existential ride. We allow this relationship - and the movie - to take us places we'd never usually go. |
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| (Desson Thomson, Washington Post) |
| This comedy drama is an exercise in self-indulgence for O'Toole, but an enjoyable and touching one. |
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| (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader) |
| The suggestion that Peter O'Toole is playing some version of his real self in Venus adds a bittersweet poignancy to this quietly affecting British drama. |
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| (Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle) |
| O'Toole gives a staggering performance - fearless, defiantly untamed and in its own way a work of art. |
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| (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone) |
| Peter O'Toole's tour-de-force performance makes Venus a movie not to be missed. |
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| (Claudia Puig, USA Today) |
| Melancholy but enjoyable. |
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| (Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic) |
| Genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns, breezily enjoyable throughout. |
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| (Todd McCarthy, Variety) |
| Venus is worth seeing for the scenes between O’Toole and Vanessa Redgrave as the woman he abandoned - the mother of his children. |
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| (David Edelstein, New York Magazine) |
| Though O'Toole, whose ruined beauty Michell emphasizes in frequent and tight close-ups, and newcomer Whittaker have a striking rapport, the film's most haunting moments pair him with Vanessa Redgrave - amazingly, this is their first movie together - as his ex-wife. They evoke a lifetime of love, betrayal, regret and forgiveness in the space of a few lines, then move on without missing a beat. |
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| (Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide) |
| The 50 year gap makes this a March/December romance that would impress even Charlie Chaplin and Tony Randall. This is tricky territory for a film, but Michell navigates it with sensitivity and class. Venus is not crass or exploitative. It deals seriously with the possibility that an old man might fall in love with a young woman, and that (at least on some level) those emotions might be reciprocated. There's a lot more going on here than a dirty old man ogling an attractive young thing... In Hollywood, romance is almost always equated with sex, so it's often up to non-U.S. productions to remind us that there are other components to love. Like the platonic bond in Carrington, the interaction between the leads in Venus emphasizes that some of the deepest emotional relationships have limited (or non-existent) physical components. This is a brave movie because it addresses a subject Hollywood feels uncomfortable about, yet with O'Toole's authority informing his part, it's hard to believe that Venus won't find its audience. |
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| (James Berardinelli, Reelviews) |
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, Jodie Whittaker, Leslie Phillips 
