Metacritic reviews

It’s a rom-com setup lamer than anything in the Barrymore-Sandler canon, but Binoche and Owen tackle it like high drama and eke out a few sweet moments.

Owen and Binoche's vigorous, battle-scarred performances, prop up Words and Pictures even when its plotting resorts to unbelievable devices.

Words and Pictures is the cloying title of a cloying little comedy made by talented people who, not that long ago, deserved better than this, and knew it.

Words And Pictures is supposed to be divided, as equally as its title, between these two characters. But Owen’s performance as a man who values his own faux-sophistication even as he goes to seed overpowers Binoche, leaving the movie lopsided.

Audiences will walk away thinking, "What was that?" But they will walk away thinking.

Schepisi does nothing inventive visually, and the stars can’t find the humanity beneath Di Pego’s dialogue, generate much romantic chemistry, or make their personal struggles feel like burdens instead of scripted complications they’re destined to overcome before the credits roll.

Words and Pictures doesn’t get the dunce-cap award, but it does lose points for feeling phony and contrived — especially during the moments when it appears overly proud of what it is.

At least the irony with which this transparently written and dispassionately aestheticized film so demagogically argues for the value of words and pictures is brutally convincing.

Words and Pictures never accrues enough emotional resources to bear out the darker, heavier moments, which turns its big dramatic moves into clunky embarrassments.

Clive Owen stumbles around the scenery doing unfortunate drunken-writer shtick in Words and Pictures, a formula movie whose script is yet more unfortunate.