An enjoyable, minor, lustrously shot revamping of Oscar Wilde's play about the perpetually interlocked manners of love and deception. full review

Smooth-flowing direction, a shrewdly pruned script and a top-flight ensemble cast that visibly relishes both the dialogue and one another's perfs make this a tony item for upscale, mature audiences. full review

Parker has made a sensible cinematic translation of Wilde's play, intercutting scenes which would have been played consecutively on the stage. full review

[I]t's likely that Mr. Wilde, who once wrote, 'A poet can survive anything but a misprint,' would have been less than thrilled with the result. full review

Wilde was always about lots more than witty repartee, and as sparkling as his play is as drawing-room comedy, it reveals his concern with the timeless values of unselfish love and forgiveness. full review

In adapting the play, Mr. Parker has streamlined and rewritten Wilde's dialogue, keeping some (but not all) of Wilde's biting epigrams and scraping off a lot (perhaps too much) of the Victorian crust. full review

[T]his Husband plods and ambles and bears the burden of a soundtrack that resembles a wimpy meditation tape. full review

[The] film is hardly memorable, but it's amusing enough for two hours, and it never panders or cloys. full review

An irresistible concoction of brilliant dialogue, sumptuous set design, top-notch acting, and a plot littered with Machiavellian twists. full review

Our familiarity with the actors, and their comfort in this period setting, lend the piece an unexpected air of naturalism. full review

An Ideal Husband works because Wilde created an expert mechanism (kind of slow-motion serious screwball comedy) for manipulating the plot and characters. full review

Parker, who himself adapted Wilde's play for the movie, takes what to purists may be an unforgivable number of liberties with the story, fleshing out the plot and even adding dialogue. full review

Much of the four acts of An Ideal Husband, a serious comedy, is constructed out of flip one-liners, most of which remain, though Parker has added a few, all unworthy of the master. full review