Critics reviews

Four Weddings and a Funeral is a romantic comedy in the grand old style of top hats and champagne. Yet underneath its tony trappings and frothy topping, [the film] is unfortunately layered with an inner unkindness and coated with a snide incivility that saps its overall merriment.

[Four Weddings's] appeal lies beyond the excitement of getting married, London’s Metropolitan charm, and the many hilarious things said by its formidable cast. The film’s longevity stems from its ability to ground these comic vignettes in a dramatically viable narrative. We can believe in the people on screen.

Four Weddings is a decidedly unremarkable visual experience, with functional camerawork and none of the surface gloss you’d typically associate with mainstream romcoms. But this lo-fi aesthetic works in the film’s favour today, lending it an air of authenticity that’s rare for the genre.

The film’s greatest strength, and the source of its enduring appeal, is its ability to capture the buzzy conviviality of a friend’s nuptials. Curtis’s script... has an intuitive sense of the expansive yet finite social atmosphere of the British upper crust.

Newell's direction switches smoothly between affecting intimacy and sequences of rowdy chaos; perhaps the film's trump card, however, is its emotional honesty, particularly in the poignant and sobering funeral scene. Genuine feel-good entertainment.

Richard Curtis's [script] is a finely crafted piece of work, combining perfectly British qualities of urbanity, naughtiness and wistful melancholy in a surprising and inventive way... Above all, Four Weddings is a triumphant marriage of British and American sensibilities – understated irony and pathos yoked to an ebullient energy and narrative drive.

Newell, a director like Stephen Frears who has no particular style but fits his undoubted expertise to the material, has to be congratulated not only for getting such good performances but for the pace and verve with which he lays out the absurdities before him.

Less contemplative than Return of the Secaucus Seven or The Big Chill, Four Weddings is more a romantic screwball comedy, one is as intoxicated by words, dialogue and characters as by love.

Weddings have rarely been choreographed so appealingly as they are [here]... And Grant is the rare actor who can mix the characteristics of sex appeal and ambivalence in believable, rather than irritating, proportions.

By the end of the movie, you find yourself reacting to the weddings, and the funeral, almost as you do at real events involving people you didn’t know very well, but liked, and wanted to know better.

Elegant, festive and very, very funny... [Newell and screenwriter Richard Curtis] confine their film's central love story to the events described by the title... [A] conceit [that] would seem strained if it didn't prove so unexpectedly graceful and inspired.

Truly beguiling romantic comedy is one of the hardest things for a modern film to pull off... [but Four Weddings and a Funeral is] frequently hilarious without being sappily sentimental or tiresomely retrograde.