A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
Virgil Films & Entertainment | Release Date: November 2, 2012 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
45
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews
Positive:
2
Mixed:
10
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
New York PostKyle SmithNov 8, 2012
Like a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanNov 14, 2012
It's like watching "Yellow Submarine" laid over a celebrity-therapy episode of Dr. Phil. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawFeb 9, 2013
The film's depiction of the ugliness and strangeness of his self-hating LA celeb lifestyle is disturbing. Not just for Python fans. Read full review
60
EmpireKim NewmanFeb 4, 2013
A moving and often funny self-portrayal of Chapman that will delight Python fans. Read full review
60
The New York TimesManohla DargisNov 8, 2012
It's a colorful patchwork of family high and low points, schoolboy days, professional triumphs and assorted epiphanies (including sex with women followed by sex with men). Read full review
60
Village VoiceBenjamin MercerNov 1, 2012
The movie has enough weird-wild-ride brio to convince you that Chapman was indeed quite a character. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeTy BurrJan 24, 2013
The results are exactly as patchwork as that sounds, with sequences of rowdy, sacrilegious invention punctuated by long spells of tedium. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyNov 16, 2012
The film only really has a pulse when it switches to live action in a few brief archival snippets, most memorably in John Cleese's appropriately outrageous eulogy for his late friend, an offering in the name of "anything for him, but mindless good taste." Read full review
50
Portland OregonianMarc MohanNov 15, 2012
Unfortunately, it just doesn't come together. The animation ranges from crude approximations of Terry Gilliam's cutout style to borderline puerility, and the entire enterprise strives far too desperately for the sort of irreverence that Chapman could conjure with a cock of his pipe-clenching head. Read full review
42
The A.V. ClubNoel MurrayOct 31, 2012
What's missing from this movie is any of that sense of what made Chapman so important, or why he was so often at the center of Monty Python's best skits and movies, up until his death from cancer at 48. Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierNov 8, 2012
John Cleese, Michael Palin and Chapman himself (courtesy of interviews, skits and various recordings he made before his death from cancer in 1989) chime in. It's an odd little trip, but if it weren't, one would have to ask, "Well what's all this, then?" Read full review
40
Time OutJoshua RothkopfOct 31, 2012
A coda shifts to video footage of Cleese's irreverent eulogy; you wish the whole film could have been as slyly somber. It's what the colonel would have insisted upon. Read full review
30
Los Angeles TimesMark OlsenNov 2, 2012
Feels like a failure on all fronts - unpleasant to look at, needlessly in 3D, drearily unfunny and worst of all an incomplete portrait of the person to whom it is ostensibly paying tribute. Read full review
20
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottNov 16, 2012
But artistically interesting only takes a film so far. What it needs are laughs- - or at least a compelling narrative. It's got neither -- with the result being a film that arrives as dead as a certain parrot from a certain skit. One of the funny ones. Read full review
0
Slant MagazineCalum MarshOct 29, 2012
Graham Chapman's story, frankly, is better served by his Wikipedia page. Read full review
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