Calendar Girls - Reception

Reception

In his review in the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell called "minty-cool" Helen Mirren and "deft" Julie Walters "a graceful pair of troupers" and "a sunny, amusing team" and described the film as "yet another professionally acted and staged wry-crisp comedy about British modesty ... that gets its laughs, but seems increasingly out of date ... When the biggest compliment you can pay a picture is that it is professional and not smug, there's a little something missing, like invention."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, "It's the kind of sweet, good-humored comedy that used to star Margaret Rutherford, although Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, its daring top-liners, would have curled Dame Margaret's eyebrows ... That the movie works, and it does, is mostly because of the charm of Mirren and Walters, who show their characters having so much fun that it becomes infectious."

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Ruthe Stein said it is "A charming movie ... should appeal to fans of The Full Monty and Waking Ned Devine — and not just because they also featured nudity that made you smile instead of smirk. The films share a wonderfully British wry humor. They're not laugh-out-loud funny, but there's quite a bit to amuse you when thinking about the scenes later."

Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times said the film "is closer in texture and consistency to individually wrapped American cheese than good, tangy English Cheddar. But even humble plastic-wrapped cheese has its virtues and so does this film, which for its first hour hums along principally by virtue of many, many shots of the verdant Yorkshire Dales and the professional good graces of its cast. Chief among those graces are Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, two well-matched and criminally underused actresses who ... tend to make you regret the movie that could have been, even as they felicitously help pass the time ... Although they have little to do but grin and bare it, Mirren and Walters are delightful company."

In Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum graded the film B+ and commented, " is the first export from the light-comedy-steamroller division of the British film industry that avoids, for the most part, the kind of queasy class condescension such hell-bent charmers have relied on since unemployed steel-mill workers shook their groove thangs in The Full Monty. Once again, British people do things that British people are not expected to do; the ladies are related to the coal miner's son who pirouetted in Billy Elliot and the tweedy widow who harvested dynamite weed in Saving Grace."

Variety critic Derek Elley said the film "delivers very likable, if sometimes dramatically wobbly, results ... Though the film is never dull, and playing by the cast is spirited, it's actually a surprisingly gentle movie, with no big Full Monty-like finale to send auds buzzing into the street. The humor has a typically British, offhanded flavor, and the essentially simple story plays more as a multi-character rondo on a single idea. For every laugh-out-loud moment, or eccentric touch, there are equal moments of reflection and pause ... Despite an uncertain start in establishing a consistent comic tone, pic builds into an engaging, light character comedy, played somewhere between the Ealing tradition and contempo regional comedy. The challenge from the halfway point is to turn these mild English stereotypes into more substantial characters an audience will empathize with; it's a challenge only half met by scripters Towhidi and Firth."

In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw rated the film three out of a possible five stars and added, "This genial comedy, directed by Nigel Cole, with an excellent, tightly constructed script by Tim Firth and Juliette Towhidi, accentuates the positive. There's lots of wit and pluck and not much heartbreak," and Mark Kermode of The Observer said, "When the film succeeds, as it does magnificently in the first two-thirds, one can only marvel at the miracle of a world in which such plotlines could literally land on a producer's doorstep with the morning papers. When it fails, it is the film's acknowledgment of its own big-screen inevitability that is to blame. The result is half a great British screen comedy, twice as much as one usually expects from the genre nowadays ... Ultimately, however, this remains an immensely likeable and often impressive romp."