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You Hurt My Feelings Reviews
Ultimately, You Hurt My Feelings asks the right questions—the ripe paranoid thoughts people might have about their own artistic work and the fine line between honesty and support—but falters in its somewhat middling execution.
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 3, 2024
A deceptively complex examination of the relationship between feelings and words, and how inadequately we often navigate the two.
Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jun 17, 2024
Its watchable, it’s charming, it just doesn’t have that much to say
Full Review | Original Score: B | Apr 24, 2024
A movie with deeply humanist roots that relies on the remarkable performance of Louis-Dreyfus, one of those artists who acts without seeming like she's performing. [Full review in Spanish]
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 5, 2024
Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth’s sense of betrayal beautifully – it’s hilarious, but rooted in real pain. It again makes you wonder why she hasn’t had more opportunities to carry a film.
Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 7, 2024
With “You Hurt My Feelings,” writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s ongoing collaboration with Julia Louis-Dreyfus is another insightful dramedy that will hit home with middle-agers.
Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 15, 2023
There are many things that make every Nicole Holofcener film a welcome, reliable refreshment but maybe the most important is that she’s one of the very few directors currently working who are expressly an unapologetically interested in making comedies.
Full Review | Dec 14, 2023
[You Hurt My Feelings] is often laugh-out-loud funny (nobody surpasses Louis-Dreyfus in the sarcastic putdown department) but ultimately makes a telling point: it’s virtually impossible to survive in this modern world without lying.
Full Review | Original Score: B | Dec 7, 2023
A movie about the virtues of gentle deceit which feels a tad too deceitful in its gentleness. It’s worth seeing for the excellent cast and witty script, but it would have benefited from a bit less saccharine assurance, and a bit more honest bile.
Full Review | Nov 26, 2023
The acting is solid in this movie, and the dialog is witty. The situations are light, smart and funny. The depictions of human behavior in this film are believable, even if they are sometimes exaggerated for comic effect.
Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 24, 2023
Nicole Holofcener’s YOU HURT MY FEELINGS, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is a low-key take on the minor struggles of creative New Yorkers, and the impact of white lies.
Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 26, 2023
... An engaging drama about the lies we tell to those we love, to avoid hurting them or to boost their confidence.
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 22, 2023
Nicely acted, it’s a film for grown-ups, the kind that makes you think about everything you’ve ever said to protect and, indeed, support your loved ones. Try not to cringe.
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 18, 2023
'You Hurt My Feelings' is an easygoing comedy-drama that deals with honesty and bullsh*t in a lived-in way. There's a real sense of intelligence to how the story plays out, but it's not high-brow or inaccessible - quite the opposite, in fact.
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 17, 2023
At the epicenter are well-intentioned lies that the film’s hypothesis has it are the lubricant that makes relationships work, while honesty makes each character question their grasp of reality, self-worth and professional choices.
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 16, 2023
This gentle yet sparkling film features enough emotional honesty to have an impact, while Louis-Dreyfus's expressive performance is flanked by some reliably funny support from Michaela Watkins, Amber Tamblyn and David Cross.
Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 15, 2023
Where Holofcener takes this is both entertaining and insightful, reminding us that it's important to be nice, but perhaps not too nice.
Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2023
The film is mature, relatable and risks being terminally uncool – full of evident chagrin from Holofcener that she can’t be a new voice these days, but also comfortably embracing the old one.
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 10, 2023
Smart, understated and charming, You Hurt My Feelings takes a realistic look at long-term relationships to create a subtly funny watch.
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 10, 2023
…deals acerbically and instinctively with the nuances of everyday conversation and interaction, doubling down on the neurosis of the creative…
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 9, 2023
Review: ‘You Hurt My Feelings’: Bruised egos, rueful comedy and … socks, lots and lots of socks
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Filmmaker Nicole Holofcener has fashioned a wonderful career mining her characters’ angst and annoyances. So when in her latest wry comedy, “You Hurt My Feelings,” Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Beth lets out a sigh at an anniversary dinner with her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), and beams, “We’re so lucky,” we can be fairly certain that Beth’s contentment isn’t going to last much past the meal.
Everything we learn about Beth and Don’s marriage in the film’s opening half-hour, from the thoughtful way they treat each other to the way that their open displays of affection (and the way they share an ice cream cone) grosses out their adult son, Eliott (Owen Teague), seems to confirm the proclaimed good fortune. Professionally, they’re both sort of successful. Beth makes a living as a writer (mostly; she also teaches) and Don has been a therapist for many years.
But there’s also the sense that by saying these words out loud, Beth is, to a small degree, trying to talk herself into believing them. Yes, “You Hurt My Feelings” explores the incident of its title and the risks and limits of total honesty in a relationship. But it’s also a funny and incisive look at middle-age malaise, a time when potential has been replaced by plateaus and one might take an inordinate amount of pleasure in the comfort that comes from a well-made pair of socks.
The hurting of feelings happens inside Paragon Sports, a Manhattan institution where Don and struggling actor Mark (Arian Moayed) are lost in thought, shopping for socks. So … many … socks. Beth and her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins), who’s married to Mark, decide to surprise them and also learn how the men could possibly spend the better part of an hour debating the merits of footwear. Approaching, they hear Don telling Mark that he’s dreading reading yet another draft of Beth’s new book — a novel that he has assured her, more than once, is wonderful.
Beth is crushed. Her first book, a memoir, sold modestly. None of the students in the writing class she leads have even heard of it. So her self-esteem is already shaky. And now this betrayal. “I’m never going to be able to look him in the face ever again,” Beth tells Sarah, spiraling. “How can he respect me if he doesn’t like my work?” She’s self-aware enough to know that she needs approval, particularly from the man she loves and, up to this moment, has trusted.
Our critics pick their highlights and lowlights from the Cannes Film Festival
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Holofcener treats Beth’s wounded ego seriously, but also with a light touch, never losing sight of the comic potential that comes from piercing the vanity of the privileged. She has long excelled, in movies like “Lovely and Amazing,” “Walking and Talking” and “Enough Said,” at creating smart, self-aware women and then putting them in situations that make you laugh, make you wince and hurt your heart.
In Louis-Dreyfus , who starred opposite James Gandolfini in “Enough Said,” Holofcener has found the ideal collaborator, an actor gloriously adept at wigging out but also capable of conveying vulnerability with a persuasive honesty. Louis-Dreyfus’ work in these two movies has been nothing short of revelatory.
For a film that runs a tight 93 minutes, “You Hurt My Feelings” manages, through a parade of deftly constructed scenes, to introduce us to a world of characters that, by the story’s end, we feel we know intimately. Holofcener makes great use of David Cross and Amber Tamblyn as a bickering couple that Don is treating, quite unsuccessfully, it should be noted. Watkins and Louis-Dreyfus share a superb rapport as sisters and the great Jeannie Berlin has two perfect scenes playing their headstrong mother, a woman who possesses a peculiarly optimistic vision for the ways that potato salad can be carried.
They’re all nursing grievances, some petty, some valid. (Don really does seem to be off his game as a therapist.) The main quartet — Don and Beth, Mark and Sarah — are a little adrift, trying to stay engaged, but sometimes losing the battle to keep apathy at bay. By the film’s end, some lessons will have been learned, though Holofcener proffers them with such disarming skill that you may not be aware you absorbed them. It feels like a magic trick.
'You Hurt My Feelings'
Rating: R, for language Running time: One hour, 33 minutes Playing: Starts May 26 in general release
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