Metacritic reviews

Overall, the lively, unfussy Hampstead goes down easy.

Keaton’s terrific, and it’s sweet and airy and so unhurried you really feel like you’ve had a nice afternoon in the long grasses and cool breezes on the edge of the city.

This is an unapologetically fluffy film that never digs deep into its characters’ lives. Its pleasures are patchy. Keaton offers an endearing performance, even if her chemistry with Gleeson (not on top form) is weirdly lacking.

This slight, modestly sweet and mildly charming affair squarely aimed at the older cinemagoer is just the bill for those seniors’ matinées where the ticket comes with a cuppa and a biscuit.

The quasi-credible friendship that develops between Emily and Harry gives way to a less plausible romance. But the winning, sympathetic Keaton and an enjoyably puckish Gleeson largely sell the contrived setup.

Hampstead is a perfectly good romantic dramedy.

The extemporized feel to some of the dialogue makes their rapport seem all the more credible and consequently there is something open-hearted and friendly about the performers that keeps the film watchable, for all its faults.

Gleeson and Keaton, for their part, play this bourgeois rags-to-tweed fairytale with such good humor that one is fleetingly able to overlook the frank bogusness of the mechanics that bring them together.

At any rate, Keaton and Gleeson are mostly a pleasure to watch as they enact the Inevitable Stations of the Romantic Dramedy, which include the mandatory misunderstanding that leads to breakup before inevitable reconciliation.

Watching it is akin to witnessing Maggie Smith’s The Van slowly rear-end Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill: a cringing slow-mo car crash best viewed between your hands.