Nicole Kidman - who 'gives great cruel' - and Zane Pais in Margot at the Wedding. Photograph: Ken Regan/ The Kobal Collection
Be warned: Noah Baumbach's latest movie, Margot at the Wedding, means spending an hour and a half in the company of some "horrible people" (Time Out). Margot (Nicole Kidman), son in tow, heads to a remote nook of New England to cast a long and chilly shadow over her sister Pauline's (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to the unalluring Malcolm (a hammy Jack Black). Poor Pauline. Apparently the Ebola virus would make a more welcome guest, or so says the Times.
Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times tells us the characters are into "emotional laceration for fun". They are "self-absorbed, selfish, egotistical, cold" but - crucially - they are also fascinating. The Observer's Philip French also reckons that this smorgasbord of nastiness is "intelligent and subtle". But many find it simply too relentlessly unpleasant, a gory emotional snuff movie.
"Perhaps some viewers will accept this as brutally honest telling-it-like-it-is, but the spectacle of such heedless self-absorption ... will prove too great an irony for most viewers to swallow," says Variety. Kidman may give great cruel, says the Times, "but the characters are so loathsome that you long for a hurricane to sweep away this wedding party, if only to give us some respite from the niggling self-pity". We need someone, anyone, to like. Empire was also titillated by Kidman's magnificent iciness and admits that Baumbach has talent. But, again, the big red Abandon Hope sign: "This is a film to be endured, rather than enjoyed." (Although the prospect of Kidman getting stuck up a tree and needing to be rescued by the fire brigade sounds pretty enjoyable to me.)
Keeping the worst til last, the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who loved Baumbach's dysfunctional drama The Squid and the Whale, sums it up as "over-cooked, overwritten, overacted and over-directed". Way harsh or way fair?
