| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 22, 2002

I prefer Life Is Beautiful, which is clearly a fantasy, to Jakob the Liar, which is just as contrived and manipulative but pretends it is not.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

I never lost awareness that I was watching actors speaking lines, not real people.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

None of these reliable performers can put enough spin on their roles to conjure up more than the good will they've earned in previous and better movies.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Sluggish!

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

Jakob the Liar can't embrace the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

The film leans from the comedic to the near-mawkish.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

Written with astonishing crudeness!

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Robin Williams in his best film since Good Will Hunting!

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

It's jolting that such a potentially life-affirming movie could be so lifeless.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

If telling lies can save a people, he reasons, let the stories - and those fictional tanks - roll.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

Jakob the Liar plays like a Robin Williams concentration-camp comedy that was intended to cash in on the success of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

The film anticipates all laughter and emotion in ways that make it its own worst enemy.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Peter Kassovitz establishes an effectively grim, cramped yet barren setting, making respectful use of locations in Poland and Budapest.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 1, 2000

Williams' performance is a masterpiece of mixed emotions.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Jakob the Liar is so forced that only the interest of a star of Williams' magnitude could have gotten it made.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 1, 2000

A markedly better picture than Roberto Benigni's far more sentimental Oscar collector.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Seems forced, calculating, self-conscious.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

A plodding, well-intended comedy-drama drowned in a muddy palette of grays and browns, thick with the odd sound of American actors using fake Polish accents.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000