Plot
Straight-laced Princeton University admissions officer Portia Nathan (Tina Fey) is caught off-guard when she makes a recruiting visit to an alternative high school overseen by her former college classmate, the free-wheeling John Pressman (Paul Rudd). Pressman has surmised that Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), his gifted yet very unconventional student, might well be the son that Portia secretly gave up for adoption many years ago. Soon, Portia finds herself bending the rules for Jeremiah, putting at risk the life she thought she always wanted — but in the process finding her way to a surprising and exhilarating life and romance she never dreamed of having.
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Film information
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Movie Reviews:
- 75The Globe and Mail (Toronto) - by Rick Groen
The result is a picture curiously yet intriguingly at odds with itself: One moment is edgy, the next is not; the cast is terrific, the direction is not; here it’s satirically sharp, there it’s sloppily sentimental; now we’re happily engaged, then we’re cruelly dumped. Some films are electric – Admission settles for alternating current. ...read more - 75The A.V. Club - by Nathan Rabin
Admission ultimately can’t quite figure out what kind of a film it wants to be, so like a lot of promising but unfocused contenders, it never quite lives up to its potential. But there’s value to be found in its meandering. ...read more - 75Entertainment Weekly - by Owen Gleiberman
Admission, a likably breezy campus movie directed by Paul Weitz (About a Boy), is blissfully non-insulting. ...read more - 65NPR - by Ella Taylor
Where "About a Boy" was both funny and wise about urban alienation, Admission settles for skin deep. ...read more - 63USA Today - by Claudia Puig
Largely because of its engaging cast, Admission is an amiable, but only slightly-above-average, comic romp. ...read more - 63New York Post - by Lou Lumenick
She’s (Fey) so good that — up to a point — you can ignore Paul Weitz’ erratic direction and a patchy script, both of which clumsily handle shifts between comedy and drama. ...read more - 63ReelViews - by James Berardinelli
My evaluation is to wait-list Admission and catch it when it reaches the less demanding platform of home video. ...read more - 63
- 63Boston Globe - by Ty Burr
Cheerful, skittish entertainment that never takes its subject seriously enough. ...read more - 63Chicago Tribune - by Michael Phillips
There's a good movie in this story. The one that got made is roughly half-good. ...read more - 63Movie Nation - by Roger Moore
Fey plays this inner-outer conflict well. But at her most wide-eyed and vulnerable, she still has trouble making a romance credible, even with Rudd, edgy comedy’s puppy dog of a leading man. ...read more - 50San Francisco Chronicle - by Mick LaSalle
Everybody in Admission is funny - Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shawn - but they're not funny in Admission. ...read more - 50St. Louis Post-Dispatch - by Calvin Wilson
Admission is one film you may not want to get into. ...read more - 50Arizona Republic - by Bill Goodykoontz
Admission is pleasant enough. Even when off a bit, the talent of the cast assures that. But it’s still a disappointment. You might say it, ahem, doesn’t make the grade. ... - 50
- 50The New York Times - by A.O. Scott
Mr. Weitz lines up a target placed at the explosive intersection of class, race, region and every other source of societal anguish, and then does not so much miss as aim in another direction — or several — letting fly a volley of darts that land as lightly as badminton birdies. ... - 50Rolling Stone - by Peter Travers
I'd see Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in anything, but this is pushing it. Admission is so slight that a breeze could flatten it. ...read more - 50Chicago Sun-Times - by Richard Roeper
Admission has some sublime moments, most of them involving Fey and Rudd dancing around their inevitable romance. The problem is in the foundation. ... - 50Austin Chronicle - by Marjorie Baumgarten
Never finding its right tone, Admission uncomfortably founders between the story’s comic and dramatic aspects and leaves behind a lumpy residue that tars its likable leads. ...read more - 50Village Voice - by Stephanie Zacharek
Weitz, an openhearted director if not always a precise one, can't bring himself to whet the knives. Only Fey drills to the center of what Admission might have been—her performance has more layers of emotion than the picture does. ...read more - 50The Hollywood Reporter - by Todd McCarthy
Deftly playing Tina Fey's feminist-icon mother, Lily Tomlin all but steals Admission, a knowing but uneven comedy about the neuroticism of the college-admission process on both sides of the equation. ...read more - 50Film.com - by William Goss
Actions do have their consequences, though, and Weitz doesn’t try to end things too tidily for their own good. Were only that he had succeeded in committing to one of those films over the other, then Admission might have been this year’s “Liberal Arts” rather than this year’s “Smart People.” ...read more - 50Variety - by Peter Debruge
The comedy feels forced as Fey works overtime to insert unnecessary zingers at the tail of every scene. If the cast weren’t so endearing, her actions could easily sour an audience on the whole experience, and Admission digs itself a hole only an ensemble this appealing can escape. ... - 42Charlotte Observer - by Lawrence Toppman
Doris Day will be 89 in two weeks, which makes her exactly half a century too old to play the lead in Admission. That’s a pity, as perhaps only she could have done it justice – if it had been made in 1958. ...read more - 42Christian Science Monitor - by Peter Rainer
Granted, this is not automatic laugh-riot material, nor should it be, but didn’t Fey recognize how hackneyed it all is? Does being a movie star mean blanding out everything that makes you special? ...read more - 40Time - by Mary Pols
While Admission remains the story of a woman who comes to question her past choices and jeopardize her career, the movie version is lighter, fluffier and dramatically inert. ...read more - 40Time Out New York - by Joshua Rothkopf
Admission’s comedy has walls built around it; director Paul Weitz (About a Boy), normally a softener of harsh edges, might have been stymied by Fey’s snappy persona. ...read more - 40New York Magazine (Vulture) - by David Edelstein
That first half of Admission is a lot for an actress to overcome. It’s not just very bad, it’s very fast, as if someone had overwound the metronome. Fairly naturalistic lines are delivered at the pace of screwball zingers — which stubbornly refuse to zing. ...read more - 38Slant Magazine - by
The estrogenic elements prove widely ineffectual, but they're just pieces of this overlong, overloaded misfire whose double-entendre title ultimately just goads the jaded viewer to admit defeat. ...read more - 33The Playlist - by Gabe Toro
It’s as if Weitz knows he’s got a corpse of a film on his hands -- never trust a movie when it feels as though you can see the director clasping the defibrillator. ...read more - 30Wall Street Journal - by Joe Morgenstern
Nobody doesn't like Tina Fey, and anyone aware of her starring role in Admission will be wishing her well. But wishing won't make this dramedy any less dreary than it is. ...read more - 20New York Daily News - by Joe Neumaier
The bad news about Admission is that this thin envelope of a comedy checks all the boxes for being a phoned-in, phony, padded rom-com. ...read more
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