Metacritic reviews

One reason the film version of Terrence McNally's play Love! Valour! Compassion! is so moving is that this complicated group portrait never loses its slippery emotional footing.

The best thing the filmmakers did was to pull a cast out of the stage productions. Importantly, the actors convey a sense of history and comfort with each other.

While director Joe Mantello (who also helmed the stage production) often uses the opened-up space of the movie well, he doesn't always avoid some of the common pitfalls that come with adapting plays.

It's rare for homosexuals in mainstream motion pictures to be presented as individuals rather than icons; Love! Valour! Compassion! defies tradition by proffering its characters as real people with believable problems.

Yet Love! Valour! Compassion! has power and insight, and perhaps what makes it strong is its disinterest in technical experiments: It is about characters and dialogue, expressed through good acting--the very definition of the "well-made play."

McNally adapted his Tony-award winning play for the screen, and for once a movie is an improvement on the stage version.

Most of the cast (along with director Joe Mantello) have been recruited from the stage play, and they all do a fine job of trimming their performances for the screen.

Yet, the problem goes beyond the film's staginess (although there's plenty of that to go around). It could even have something to do with the delicate difficulties involved in the successful transfer of stage camp to the more intimate level of film.

But what McNally, director Joe Mantello and a cast brought straight from the original New York stage production all accomplish is the creation of an honest, clever, poignant work about men who also happen to be gay, rather than a self-conscious polemic about gays who it turns out just happen also to be men.

Love! Valour! Compassion!, an adaptation of Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning play, which has piano music and exclamation points to spare, is excruciatingly predictable, creatively inane and almost offensive in its depiction of gay characters.