A Little White Lie - Movie Reviews (2024)

The supporting cast lend the story heft where they can, but the scale of A Little White Lie is too small to contain the wild, wandering tangents of the plot.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.0/10 | Jun 2, 2023

This oddity keeps Michael Shannon in a daze while everything around him utterly fails to find satire in the literary world and instead substitutes both obvious and idiotic twists to find eventual clarity.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | May 22, 2023

A flawed but curiously winning comedy-drama of mistaken identity...a small, wistful dramedy that invites chuckles rather than the big belly-laughs of so many raunchy campus farces. And it’s all the better for it.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Apr 4, 2023

A short speech that Shannon gives during a forum on art and reality should be clipped from the movie and preserved as a beautiful piece of work in an otherwise negligible effort.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

A Little White Lie captures the absurdity of it all regarding academia’s obsession with publishing and self-proclaimed artists. However, the script is underdeveloped, while the plot is fundamentally flawed.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 16, 2023

The problem with this was that parts of the plot made absolutely no sense.

Full Review | Mar 15, 2023

I kept thinking to myself "This is a stupid movie -- but it got me."

Full Review | Mar 15, 2023

Its observations on the world it is showing are surface-level, at best, and not nuanced. It's too quirky and not in a good way. "A Little White Lie" is, in a word, lifeless.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/10 | Mar 13, 2023

Surprise: Maren and Shannon succeed after all, with help from Kate Hudson and an energetic cast of players.

Full Review | Mar 8, 2023

When a burnt-out handyman gets mistaken for a famous reclusive author, he decides to play along with the mix up and accepts an invitation to attend a college literary festival to talk about his work.

Full Review | Mar 8, 2023

But more than that, A Little White Lie addresses questions we might well ask ourselves: What are we capable of? How would we behave if we were treated as someone who's "great" -- would we become great ourselves?

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 7, 2023

The gentle pace and serious-minded approach keep the film mildly entertaining as it plays with ideas about identity and artistic ambition. But it's badly in need of a spark of energy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 7, 2023

A good cast (excluding Michael Shannon who is boring to a fault) fails to bring spark to a lifeless and dull story

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Mar 7, 2023

Too bad the observations of the academics never were that deep or emotionally connective.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Mar 7, 2023

Michael Shannon is the kind of actor that could even make the phonebook sound interesting. And while he's good, the movie that surrounds him isn't as much.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Mar 6, 2023

A Little White Lie, which director Michael Maren adapted from the best-selling novel “Shriver” by Chris Beldon, is an uneven but entirely watchable tale. It’s mostly a farce that occasionally but unsuccessfully dips into rom-com and satire.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 5, 2023

Michael Shannon excels at playing moody, dark characters. Putting him in a comedy seems like an odd choice. His casting in A LITTLE WHITE LIE turns out to be perfect, because the whole point is that his character is meant to stick out like a sore thumb.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 4, 2023

... overloaded with quirks and whimsy rather than grounded in reality, leaving the esteemed cast with too much heavy lifting to sell the ruse.

Full Review | Mar 4, 2023

The film's biggest con doesn't come from [its] imposter protagonist so much as the messy script and direction.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 3, 2023

When we talk about small, finely crafted, dialogue-driven gems with interesting characters and little or no CGI, it’s easy to say, “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” but the good news is that’s not really accurate.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 3, 2023