Metacritic reviews

The deadly sins of envy, lust and salacious gossip in deepest rural England provide the motor for Stephen Frears's black romp, featuring vivacious former Bond girl Gemma Arterton.

Think The Archers with a sprinkling of trendier folk and a lot more shagging. Very intelligently funny, with stellar performances.

Jaunty and entertaining.

While Tamara Drew is enjoyable throughout-right up to its loony, loony ending-it's more than a little scattered.

Adapted from a comicstrip-turned-graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, which was itself based on Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd," picture represents a satirical but soft-biting swipe at contempo middle-class mores among Blighty's chattering countryside classes.

Frears might have accelerated the comic pacing, but the story is a good one and events come nicely to a boil.

Thomas Hardy it's not, but as far as middlebrow British romances go, better this than "Love Actually."

Most of Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe is so breezily entertaining, and so bracingly clear-eyed about what total pains in the asses writers can be, that its final 15 minutes feel like an all-wrong slap in the face.

Strikingly picturesque locations and a terrific ensemble cast help this tonally inconsistent adaptation of Posy Simmonds's comic series pass by with relative ease, though it leaves a very peculiar aftertaste.

This rotely cheeky, Anglo-plastic adultery comedy is set in the golden-green English countryside, and it makes a few quirky nods toward artistry, but it's really just a glib concoction.