Recensioni di Metacritic

The film is emotionally manipulative, to be sure, but it's ultimately hard to resist, especially given the quality of the lead performances.

Somehow Murphy manages to lift his dignified, all-knowing servant character off the page, giving a meticulously composed performance in a vehicle that can’t help but feel superficially repackaged.

Get out your handkerchiefs, but don’t expect to believe a minute of this vastly improbable tale.

Murphy is fine as the title character, although his performance consists mostly of suppressing all of his usual shtick. He certainly doesn’t endow Mr. Church with any unexpected depths. But then neither does the script.

It flails for the heartstrings, but instead of reaching them, it only tugs at that muscle that makes you roll your eyes at its old-fashioned, melodramatic attempts at emotion.

It’s the film’s racial politics, particularly its stereotypical evocation of willing servitude by an African-American, and its characters’ refusal to acknowledge this imbalance of power, which make it not so much old-fashioned as downright retrograde – and likely to go down even worse with black audiences than Driving Miss Daisy.

A small, unflashy, borderline incompetent movie like Mr. Church is certainly another sign that Murphy does what he wants. Maybe this guarded performance in a lousy movie is a sign of him wanting to do something better.

Bruce Beresford's film is remarkable for how it manages to indulge so many offensive and shopworn clichés at once.

A crude sugary-sweet fantasy.

There’s nothing wrong with melodrama. But in order to break the dishes, movies have to be willing to build tension by holding something back. Mr. Church, however, is all reveal, constantly giving everything away in the most obvious fashion.