[de Aranoa is] a director at home with the small things that can make a film great -- interested in what keeps people together when everything around them is being blown apart. It's a wonderful gift.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2016

Del Toro and Robbins adroitly capture the dark humour of the drama, and their scenes together are gems of bleak comedy.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 10, 2016

What the film does well is to immerse us in the tragic weirdness of wartime logic, where nothing works as we would expect. It's a strong, engaging film about how hard it is to wage peace.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 9, 2016

A taut, darkly comic drama about the dilemmas of international intervention in civil war, all of it neatly symbolized by one elusive length of rope. It is also, sadly, a film much marred by its sexism.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 26, 2016

A Perfect Day is a war story told on a small scale. It's all the more powerful for its subtlety.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 25, 2016

This is one of those rare, thoughtful war movies that doesn't emphasize brutality.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 4, 2016

With an eclectic soundtrack, well-timed editing and crisp cinematography - and of course that terrific cast led by the great Del Toro - A Perfect Day is a rough-edged gem.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 21, 2016

The film may be scattershot and odd, but it needs to be odder still.

| Jan 18, 2016

Del Toro's low-key resignation gives the film what power it has, but the female characters (played by Mlanie Thierry and Olga Kurylenko) are disappointingly thin.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 15, 2016

They say that war is hell. War relief doesn't look like any kind of picnic either ...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 15, 2016

It suffers from a marked lack of narrative energy and a regrettable surfeit of clichd characterization.

| Jan 14, 2016

Has so little to say about miasmatic global conflicts that the film feels sketched rather than fully drawn.

| Original Score: 4.5/10 | Jan 14, 2016

There's not much of a story, which wouldn't be bad if there was something other than blasts of music filling the longueurs.

| Jan 14, 2016

Extremely witty and light on its feet, yet it manages to be thoughtful, even philosophical, in an absurdist way, about the roots of human conflict.

| Jan 14, 2016

A wry salute to the world's hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance.

| Original Score: B | Jan 14, 2016

On a moment-to-moment basis, A Perfect Day is reasonably engaging, mostly because of its novel milieu ...

| Original Score: B- | Jan 14, 2016

The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 10, 2016

The low-stakes shaggy-dog plot allows for a variety of vignettes that reveal how the civil conflict eroded people's humanity, but the movie's orthodox antiwar sentiment carries the story only so far.

| Oct 22, 2015

While it's uneven, A Perfect Day builds to a nice melancholy conclusion.

| May 25, 2015

Inconsistency is A Perfect Day's biggest problem. The script is scalpel sharp in some places, flabby as the well-blocker in others.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 25, 2015