All three actors play their usual stock characters here.

| Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 3, 2020

The Big Year is completely predictable and full of way too many bird-watching montages set to inspiring music, but it's such an upbeat, cheery film that it's pretty hard to resist.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 23, 2012

If you can get past the obviously obscure subject matter, you'll find a really sweet film beneath.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 13, 2012

If you go into it not expecting big comedy, "The Big Year" can be an enjoyable diversion for an evening. But it helps if you like nature.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Feb 5, 2012

The movie roams through its numerous picturesque locations with a pleasant enough grace, while Frankel adds just enough idiosyncratic musical and visual quirks to keep things interesting.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 27, 2012

Frankel and co might have taken a bolder step into the darkly comedic look of the birder's psyche and added more of a gust of air into this film's feathers ...

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 8, 2011

If you are stuck in a rut and really want to follow your dreams, try this gentle, light-hearted comedy.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 8, 2011

The opposite of the quiet, contemplative activity ornithology is supposed to be, this may well be the joke, in which case it's the only one.

| Dec 4, 2011

A charming little narrative movie that is so amiably ridiculous that you're sure it must have been invented... The three stars bring their most satisfying games, their comedy small and human-scaled rather than broad and slapsticky..

| Dec 2, 2011

A comedy with fewer laughs than measles.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 2, 2011

A feather-light tale that never really takes off.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 1, 2011

It's theoretically possible for laughs to be gouged out of this scenario, but you won't find them here: every move, every joke, every emotion is heaved lumberingly into place.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 1, 2011

The Big Year is as glossy and inert as Martin's face, which these days seems to require more foundation than the Burj Khalifa.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 1, 2011

Even though it's rather corny and sentimental, this colourful comedy-drama holds our interest mainly because it's about a subject we'd never imagine watching a film about.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 1, 2011

Just a load of planes, cranes and Himalayan snowcocks.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 30, 2011

Engaging, low-key comedy enlivened by likeable characters, strong performances and an original central premise, though it's slightly undone by an overwritten script and a grating, ever-present voiceover.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 30, 2011

Owen Wilson, Jack Black and Steve Martin find a formula for blandness

| Nov 14, 2011

Veers close to being The Bucketful-of-Birds List. So pleasantly decent and hesitant to be complex that it's rather simple-minded; it just doesn't make an obsession sing to us.

| Nov 11, 2011

In some alternate universe, a much better version of The Big Year exists, one that embraces the essential, insular weirdness and romantic fanaticism of the birding community it chronicles.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 21, 2011

The result is an offence-free, mild entertainment in which everyone from cast to scriptwriter seems to be winging it.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 21, 2011