Rotten
The next chapter in Laura's story might be something worth rooting for, but here's hoping she has a different writer penning her lines.
John DeFore, Washington Post
Overview
It's a movie for everyone whose life has been thrown off-course, out of whack, or simply not turned out the way they planned it. In other words, it's a movie for everyone, period. Set in suburban Long Island in the summer of 2002, with the psychic wounds of 9/11 still fresh, A Little Help is a story that takes a comic, searching and profoundly empathetic look at a few pivotal months in the life of dental hygienist Laura Pehlke (Jenna Fischer)-an ordinary woman whose life suddenly flies off the rails-and her heroic efforts to re-establish a sense of security and normalcy for herself and her son.
Director and cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
41%
Tomatometer
Fresh
A Little Help doesn't dazzle, and you can pick at its parts, but Fischer's performance gives the movie a sense of romantic weariness that lingers. Life is a series of disasters to be weathered, no matter how cute you are.
Tom Long, Detroit News
Rotten
The film suffers from an uncertain tone, playing serious situations for laughs while supplying Laura with a drinking habit and a hair-trigger temper that come across as problems rather than endearing foibles.
Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Fresh
This is one of the smarter, more honest scripts to be filmed in quite some time. And Jenna Fischer gives one of the smarter, more honest - and vulnerable, and tough - performances by an actress on the big screen in an even longer stretch.
Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
Rotten
It's not that Jenna Fischer is miscast in "A Little Help.'' It's that she's mis-everything else: misused, misdirected, misanthropic.
Wesley Morris, Boston Globe
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