Critic Reviews

• David Martindale, Dallas Morning News

  Don't let the innocuous title fool you. Family Weekend is a subversive little comedy in which a tightly wound misfit of a teenage girl, fed up with watching her family spiral out of control, subjects her parents to an extreme intervention.

• Tom Long, Detroit News

  The unconventional dysfunctional family has now become a Hollywood convention. It is familiar to a fault.

• Farran Smith Nehme, New York Post

  For a long while, director Benjamin Epps goes for breakneck farce; at its best, this is a batty mixture of family-values editorial and teen spoof.

• Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger

  We're sitting there, trapped. An angry little teenager's yelling at us. And we're not having any fun at all.

• Andy Webster, New York Times

  The script, by Matt K. Turner, is loaded with contradictions, its hollow flirtation with subversion amount to airplane pablum.

• Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times

  What keeps the film afloat is the buoyant young cast, with Rulin especially watchable as the tightly wound lead and Joey King as her younger sister, who's an aspiring actress.

• Ron Wilkinson, Monsters and Critics

  A couple twists short of a good comedy; this film seems like more of a TV prime time test spin for the cast and crew than a fully developed film.

• Dann Gire, Daily Herald (IL)

  Family Weekend is just as simpy as its plot sounds, but under Alabama-born director Epps, making his feature directing debut, this comedy skips along on good intentions with actors who put more into the characters than they deserve.

• Mark Adams, Screen International

  An enjoyably leftfield oddball comedy.

• Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru

  Anarchic, silly, witless, cartoonish and unsophisticated despite lively performances by the talented Olesya Rulin and Joey King.

• S. Jhoanna Robledo, Common Sense Media

  Teen tries to repair dysfunctional family in so-so comedy.

• Wesley Lovell, Cinema Sight

  An appealing film about the rigors of parenting and misperception of what it takes to be a parent.

• Robert Denerstein, Movie Habit

  Feels longer than just two days

• Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com

  In need of a more judicious editor and a game plan to approach the steady erosion of marriage with a profound hit of honesty, not just a sitcom-style presentation of forced therapy.

• Dustin Putman, DustinPutman.com

  Who was "Family Weekend" made for? Beats the hell out of me.

• Jennie Kermode, Eye for Film

  Despite the occasional descent into clumsy farce, it largely succeeds in creating its own space and providing a pleasingly different teen perspective on life.

Read all 16 critic reviews