The verdict is in. The critics like Ben Stiller’s new movie “While We’re Young” which is due out this Friday.
The actor could certainly use the good news. His last film, the hopefully final installment in the Night at the Museum series, was panned by the critics. While it did make a couple of hundred million worldwide, the movie brought in much less than its studio had hoped.
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Stiller’s last few films before that like “The Watch” and “Tower Heist” were also box office duds. In fact, he hasn’t had a movie that was both a hit with the critics and with audiences in which he appeared in front of the camera since 2008’s “Tropic Thunder.”
As for “While We’re Young, ” Rotten Tomatoes gave it an 86% rating. The movie, which co-stars Amanda Seyfried and Naomi Watts, was written and directed by Noah Baumbach.
Stiller and Watts play a childless New York married couple in their mid-forties who are beginning to feel their ages. Their world is turned around when they begin to hang out with a younger couple.
Variety said, “If age is just a state of mind, then “While We’re Young” is the best kind of therapy a fortysomething starting to lose touch with the younger generation could hope for: Witty, articulate and reminiscent of several talented directors who no longer mean so much to today’s kids, Noah Baumbach’s latest stars Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as husband-and-wife filmmakers who “adopt” a mid-20s hipster couple as friends. Though not as broadly appealing as a Judd Apatow picture, Baumbach’s own acutely observed this-is-life laffer features his most relatable characters yet. Marketed right, it stands to considerably outperform his other pics, which tend to top out around $4 million.”
And Lou Lumenick compared the movie to the films of Woody Allen writing in the New York Post, “Setting his film in a privileged white world so familiar to Allen’s fans, Baumbach hilariously skewers things like hip hop dancing and a drug-fueled encounter group with a shaman — you half expect Jeff Goldblum’s character from “Annie Hall” to show up looking for his mantra.”
