Los Angeles Times
"ZACK AND MIRI has a bright, chipper look to it....[Rogen is] a master of making it look easy. It takes skill to come off like you're making it up as you go....[Banks is] on top of her game here." 10/31/2008Chicago Sun-Times
"[A] very genuine romance. Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks make a lovable couple..." 11/05/2008 Rolling Stone
3 stars out of 4 -- "Rogen and Banks, both terrific, bring out the sweet and spicy best in each other....They rock it." 11/13/2008 p.98 Empire
3 stars out of 5 -- "[T]here are big, fast laughs to be had from the relentless trash talk." 01/01/2009 p.70 ReelViews 6 of 10
An interesting synergy exists between Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith. With films like Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy, Smith opened a door that, about 10 years later, Apatow walked through. Now, with Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Smith has fully and unabashedly followed Apatow back into this territory that he once owned, completing the circle. In fact, so many Apatow signatures can be found in this film that it makes one appreciate how much these two have in common. There's the full-frontal male nudity, the romantic comedy subtext, and (perhaps most tellingly) the participation of Elizabeth Banks (who played the vixen in The 40-Year-Old Virgin) and Seth Rogen, one of Apatow's best pals...The "romantic" aspect of the "romantic comedy" doesn't work as well as the "comedy" portion. Most of the movie's final third is devoted to Zack's recognition that his feelings for Miri go beyond friendship and the inevitable complications that delay the happily-ever-after moment we know will eventually arrive. There's chemistry, but not much sexual tension, between Rogen and Banks, and the romance is too heavily backloaded. By the time it shows up in full force, it has a tacked-on feel and some of its elements represent standard genre cliches. In fact - and Kevin Smith probably doesn't want to hear this comparison - there's a lot of When Harry Met Sally in the final act of Zack and Miri (although things seem more rushed). In his romantic comedies, Judd Apatow has managed to strum the viewers' heartstrings. Smith isn't as adept in that arena but, while the romance may not be the most magical to reach the screen, most viewers will be laughing so hard they won't care. - James Berardinelli
Chicago Sun-Times 8 of 10
Kevin Smith begins with the advantage of being raised with deeply embedded senses of sin and guilt. He's 38, and he still believes sex is dirty, and that it's funny to shock people with four-letter words and enough additional vulgarisms to fill out a crossword puzzle...This is sort of endearing. It gives his potty-mouth routines a certain freshness; we've heard these words over and over again, but never so many of them so closely jammed together. If you bleeped this movie for broadcast TV, it would sound like a conga line of Iron Men going through a metal detector..."Zack and Miri Make a Porno," as the title hints, is about Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) making a porno. "I don't know bleep about directing," Smith once confided to me. "But I'm a bleeping good writer"...Variety, the show-biz bible, trains its critics as keen observers of detail, and their alert senior critic Todd McCarthy observes: "There's scarcely a line of dialogue that doesn't feature the F-word, A-word, one of the C- or P-words or some variant of them"...Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks make a lovable couple; she's pretty and goes one-for-one on the bleep language, and Rogen, how can I say this, is growing on me, the big lug...Will this movie offend you? Somehow Kevin Smith's very excesses defuse the material. He's like the guy at a party who tells dirty jokes so fast, Dangerfield-style, that you laugh more at the performance than the material. He's always coming back for more. Once during a speech at the Indie Spirits, he actually sounded like he was offering his wife as a door prize. Anything for a laugh. Nobody laughed. They all looked at each other sort of stunned. You can't say he didn't try. - Roger Ebert
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