All About Steve

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Staff (Not credited)

Bullock, easing into her mid-40s with box-office mojo intact, remains the star attraction as the annoyingly endearing Mary. You simply can't imagine another actor of her stature pulling it off.

LA Weekly Chuck Wilson

Refreshingly quirky comedy.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams

There are good movies to be made about romantic obsession, but the premise doesn't work if the crazy stalker isn't juxtaposed with a sympathetic victim.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The screenplay by Kim Barker requires Bullock to behave in an essentially disturbing way that began to wear on me. It begins as merely peculiar, moves on to miscalculation and becomes seriously annoying.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Struggles mightily to find its loony essence. But Bullock's apple-cheeked larkishness is all flailing limbs and bug-eyed reaction shots - there's no there there. Cooper's character is woefully underwritten, Church's is yet another vain anchorman-wannabe cartoon.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Manages to be both toothless and tasteless in its satire of TV news sensationalism.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

There’s nothing wrong with All About Steve that a rewrite couldn’t fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story.

NPR Ella Taylor

If it's about anything at all, the lame new comedy All About Steve is mostly about Mary, a logorrheic crossword compiler with too much arcane information in her head -- and the social skills of an excitable 6-year-old boy.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

A viewer is challenged to guess what the filmmakers thought they were doing. A 1930s screwball comedy with a modern sensibility? A misguided valentine to those who march to the beat of a different drummer?

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

A creepy, humiliating ''comedy,'' playing to Bullock's worst instincts for demonstrating the lovability of women who don’t fit in.

San Francisco Chronicle Amy Biancolli

There's no footing in reality. Nothing about it feels authentic: not the blathering Mary, not the lifeless secondary characters, not the bromide-happy dialogue or the plot that twists less often than it spasms.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Bullock does her damndest to be nerdy and instead becomes excruciatingly artificial - a malfunctioning verbal fun machine.

Time Out New York Hank Sartin

A talented director might have made Bullock seem like a comic genius, but Phil Traill has no control over tone, leaving the audience unsure whether to laugh or cry.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

Indisputably awful comedy.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Just when you think your jaw can't drop any lower in appalled amazement, comes a romantic comedy so lunkheaded and ill-conceived that it makes your average, idiotic Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey outing look like the reincarnation of Hepburn and Grant.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

The concept of an intelligent woman is apparently so exotic to Ms. Bullock and her director, Phil Traill, that they frantically kook the character up, as if female smarts were a kind of disability. This being a contemporary big-studio release, I suppose it is.

Los Angeles Times Robert Abele

A dippy clunker like All About Steve has no purpose other than as a challenge: If you laden a usually charming A-lister with a thoroughly off-putting, unhinged character, can she claw her way to likability? The short answer is no. The long answer is, what in the world was Bullock, who also produced the movie, thinking?

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Much of what's offensive and insufferable about All About Steve can be laid at the feet of screenwriter Kim Barker, best known for inflicting "License to Wed" on the world. Why do these people still earn obscene amounts of money churning out dreck? And why do stars like Bullock keep paying them?

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

Since Bullock coproduced this masochistic venture, it seems she buys into the idea that fluffer-nut ditziness is what she does best. Except it isn't.

Wall Street Journal Joanne Kaufman

A head-banging excuse for a comedy.

Variety Brian Lowry

Sitting through the picture is an endurance test.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Grotesquely unfunny comedy.

Chicago Reader Cliff Doerksen

Packaged as a romantic comedy but devoid of comedy or romance, this baffling train wreck stars Sandra Bullock as a tediously kooky constructor of crossword puzzles for a Sacramento newspaper.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

How do you make a movie about a protagonist so profoundly irritating that even her loved ones barely tolerate her? And how do you avoid annoying audiences to the point of distraction in the process?

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

Insulting, witless comedy.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Easily the worst movie of the week, month, year, and Bullock’s entire career. It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Unwatchable, unbearably unfunny farce.