Metacritic reviews

Hope Springs dares viewers to look closely at the remarkable sight of naked adult intimacy and its discontents.

Hope Springs is an altogether pleasant surprise: a mainstream dramedy that frankly and intelligently addresses the challenges facing a couple after 31 years of marriage.

Deftly veering from comedy to drama, director David Frankel (who also guided Streep to one of her 17 Oscar nominations in "The Devil Wears Prada") never loses sight of the humanity and universality of the situation.

As Kay and Arnold lurch toward intimacy, the roles bring out a playful side seldom seen in Streep and practically never in Jones, his signature surliness melting into disarming smiles and tenderness.

More comedic drama than midlife romantic comedy, rather literally titled Hope Springs holds few surprises but delivers plenty of warmth.

A charming film. Not a great one, but a good one.

A decidedly adult drama about love and sex, wherein the comedy is largely incidental.

People over 60 are as sexual and complicated as their grandchildren, and there ought to be more movies about them, but only an audience as constipated as these characters could mistake this lukewarm stream of pablum for a hard nugget of truth.

Jones and Streep give likable enough performances as a humane monster and a human victim. But their characters never become more than that.

When the sing-song Jones and beatifically smiling Streep are allowed to carry the dramatic weight, you can see the raw, tough-love film that Hope Springs wants to be - until Frankel starts trying to be lighthearted and cute, at which point you see the movie's real troubled marriage in full bloom.