PS I Love You (2007)

The Village Voice 5 of 10
This isn't the first time that Richard LaGravenese, the gifted writer of A Little Princess and The Fisher King and writer-director of the lovely Living Out Loud, has gone bestseller slumming. His screenplay for The Bridges of Madison County was good enough to persuade a dispiriting number of respected critics that a movie was worth making out of that dreadful piece of pulp. Nothing, however, could redeem the chipper folk wisdom of P.S. I Love You, the first novel (for want of a better word) of Cecelia Ahern, a twenty-something Irish "writer" whose chief literary asset is a sharp eye for the winning romantic formula. Hilary Swank, who was not put in this world to simper, does little else as a young wife whose twinkly leprechaun of an Irish husband (Gerard Butler, who's Scottish, but never mind) has died, leaving her to mope around in lacy black underwear, do her nails, and lean on Mom (Kathy Bates) and the usual wisecracking friends (Lisa Kudrow and Gina Gershon)...LaGravenese has sliced away the worst of Ahern's excruciating prose, but that proves a negative virtue. With "She longed for the couch to hold out its arms to her" out of the way, there's little left to dance to but the old stages-of-grief two-step, and some blessedly irreverent noodling with Harry Connick Jr. - Ella Taylor
 
Variety 5 of 10
The question of love after death has been asked frequently enough in the movies, but seldom with the high ick factor found in "P.S. I Love You." "Ghost" with a brogue, "The Notebook" without the burden of old people, this post-life comedy will have the sentimentally challenged weeping openly, while clutching desperately to the pants-legs of boyfriends and husbands who are trying to flee up the aisle. Richard LaGravenese's trip into Lifetime territory may define the guilty pleasure of the genre...In the film's long, long pre-credits opening, Gerry (Gerard Butler) performs a striptease as LaGravenese sets up his near-perfect marriage to Holly (Hilary Swank) that is about to be sabotaged by Gerry's yet-to-be-diagnosed brain tumor...The idea of an ostensibly liberated woman living in Manhattan (despite having no visible means of support) and being dictated to by her late spouse may seem incongruous to some, and offensive to others. But to still others, it will spell a romantic ideal, embodied in a dead guy who cared enough to plan an entire year of his widow's life, replete with a trip to Ireland and a push toward new romantic horizons...As an exercise in chick-flickery, "P.S. I Love You" wants to possess the soulfulness of harsh reality and the lilt of romantic fantasy at the same time. In this case, at least, it simply can't be done. - John Anderson