Fry's dialogue is terrific and interlaces with Waugh's own wit seamlessly.

| Jan 15, 2018

Satire should seek to sterilise or maim its targets; Fry wants us to feel for them.

| Jul 29, 2015

Though it falls short of Fry's best work in other fields, this is a sound first feature.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 30, 2006

The 'wit' is leaden and unfunny; the narrative's progress ungainly; the direction stolid.

| Feb 9, 2006

One conceit of writer-director Stephen Fry is to dramatize parties as knots of chaos, social hurricanes that spill across the landscape this way and that, ruining lives, eating time, preventing progress of any kind.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2005

A great deal of fun for its first two-thirds.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 2, 2004

If this is meant to recall hell, then, baby, hell looks like a hell of a lot of fun.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 19, 2004

Though Fry's movie has plenty of nasty wit, it lacks the sheer luxurious malice of Waugh's book. Fry is acerbic; Waugh is lethal.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Oct 7, 2004

Suffers from feeling like it's just pretending to be good when it's obviously much, much happier being bad. But when it's bad, it's very, very good.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 24, 2004

If you yearn for a Brit fix, this is your flick. If not, think twice before checking it out.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 24, 2004

Since no one is playing a rounded character -- just pawns in Waugh's linguistic 'exercise' -- the performances are necessarily mere snapshots haphazardly crammed into a chaotic album.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 24, 2004

For those who mourned the final episodes of Brideshead and other installments of the queen's English, Bright Young Things is a diverting evening in the British Isles.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 24, 2004

In trying so hard not to take itself too seriously, Bright Young Things succeeds in being a lot of ado over nothing.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 24, 2004

Busy, unfocused, yet still acridly funny and moving.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 17, 2004

Seeing Bright Young Things is like going to a party that you greatly enjoy even while realizing that you may not remember it.

| Original Score: B | Sep 16, 2004

Fry, in his directing debut, shows an eye for style, a fine literary intelligence and an unmistakable heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2004

Witty, energetic adaptation.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2004

Exults in its own giddy absurdity.

| Sep 10, 2004

It's a fits-and-starts kind of thing, advancing three steps to the side for every step forward, possibly more enchanted with the vagaries of its own characters than we in the audience might be.

| Sep 10, 2004

Waugh's novel and Fry's movie wisely see that their characters live by spending their comic capital and ending up emotionally overdrawn.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 10, 2004