Reitman’s tragicomedy is a film of hard truths and no easy answers that saves some of its harshest surprises for the final moments, even as it lays the groundwork for better things to come. Reitman has an intuitive understanding of the way smiles and winces go hand in hand, which could have made the film tonally unwieldy, but instead forges it with a sense of real life. Clooney’s performance as a man who slowly and surely acknowledges the gaping holes in his philosophy is both funny but fundamentally moving, and the fact that he is not able to immediately patch those holes is not evidence of cynicism, but rather the realistic outlook that Rome was not built in a day, much less taken apart and rebuilt. (DVD Awards Screener)