This is not earthshaking material, the relationship between Axler and Pegeen, but it is honest, amusing and sympathetic. The film is worth tracking down.

| Feb 12, 2021

It's an entertaining performance in a diverting movie but as a statement on aging or insecurity or the folly of infatuation, it never sheds much light on what King Lear called, "this great stage of fools."

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2021

With the intimacy of a theatre piece, [Barry] Levinson and company play with the idea of art imitating life imitating art. Always bordering on the edge of fantasy and reality, insanity and sanity, the Humbling is contemplative and reflective.

| Dec 8, 2019

Often absurd, biting, and offbeat in ways that are surprising and often refreshing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 18, 2019

For all the positive aspects of THE HUMBLING, some scenes bog down the narrative.

| Original Score: B | Dec 8, 2018

Shot on a minimal budget by Barry Levinson from a script by Buck Henry, all doing their best work in years.

| Oct 17, 2017

... Barry Levinson's bizarre, blundering, pointless misreading of Philip Roth's penultimate novel.

| Oct 12, 2017

[The Humbling] is too impolitic to be celebrated in art-house theaters and too esoteric to be featured in today's sequel-driven multiplexes.

| Aug 3, 2017

In the end, 'The Humbling' is one of those movies where the "plot" is far less interesting than what the movie is "about" - and in this case, it's about acting in general and Al Pacino in particular.

| May 30, 2016

It definitely seems like there is a thin line between method acting and insanity in The Humbling.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2016

A melancholic alternation of bitter and comedic sketches, all resolutely low-key and wildly uneven.

| Original Score: C- | Mar 15, 2016

It's a mopey, silly situation, whose only tension comes from our perpetual fear that Levinson is about to make us watch a somber drama copulating with a farce.

| Dec 31, 2015

This is really two stories: one about an old guy trying to prove he's still got it sexually speaking, and the other about an artist losing a grip on his craft. The latter plot point is decent. The former? Yuck.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 18, 2015

A messy movie but also a thrilling one, grappling with diminished talents and vanishing virility in brutally honest ways that show up the similarly-themed Birdman as a cheap parlor trick.

| Apr 28, 2015

One of Levinson's worst movies ever, one that rambles and rambles and rambles like its lead character

| Feb 6, 2015

There is, needless to say, an overall disconnect between every facet of the story and every other.

| Original Score: 5.9/10 | Feb 2, 2015

Comes across as indulgent, finding Levinson unwilling to give the picture focus when he finds a haze of behaviors and broad performances much more appealing.

| Original Score: C | Jan 29, 2015

This is Pacino's best film performance in years. In playing an actor who has lost the art of fooling himself, he reveals with mordant wit the terrors of diminished capacity. To watch him do it is a master class.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 29, 2015

Better than Birdman, with its more poignant, less pretentious introspective grasp of the raw, revealing truths connected to the ironic and elusive notions of art, existence, self-worth, and fame. And, when not just simply deliciously weird and wicked fun.

| Jan 26, 2015

"The Humbling" reveals an ominous gulf between the director and his theme ...

| Jan 26, 2015