I Love You Phillip Morris (2009)

"Less of a comedy than a hilarious tragedy.  John Anderson, Variety
"...It's one crazy love story...  Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
"...a nervy comedy...  Stephen Holden, New York Times

Editor's Note Jim Carrey pairs up with Ewan McGregor in this film based on a true story. Carrey stars as a family man who is sent to prison and falls in love with his cellmate, Phillip Morris (McGregor). When Morris is released from prison, his new love embarks on a series of escape attempts to reunite with Morris. BAD SANTA scribes John Requa and Glenn Ficarra return to black comedy with this darkly funny directorial debut.

	Ewan McGregor
	Rodrigo Santoro
	Leslie Mann
	Jim Carrey
	Steve McVicker - Source Writer
	Glenn Ficarra - Screenwriter
	John Requa - Screenwriter
	John Requa - Director
	Glenn Ficarra - Director

Hollywood Reporter
"Carrey's chameleonlike gyrations and falsifications are deliciously funny. His comedic versatility and impersonations are amazing, but it's in his character's darkest recesses that he's truly powerful." 01/19/2009

Box Office
3 stars out of 5 -- "When Carrey is onscreen, everything about the giddy, conflicted man he's been asked to embody is either amusing, sympathetic or true." 11/15/2009

Total Film
3 stars out of 5 -- "Carrey channels his limitless energy into Russell's kaleidoscopic life..." 02/25/2010

Film Comment
"[The filmmakers have] provided Jim Carrey with his freshest, funniest role since THE CABLE GUY....I LOVE YOU, PHILLIP MORRIS sharpens Ficarra and Requa's Sturges-esque satirical vision of the American Dream." 03/01/2010

Empire
4 stars out of 5 -- "[T]his is a wonderful mix of old-school Carrey outrageousness with a genuinely touching -- and very modern -- love story." 03/19/2010

Uncut
3 stars out of 5 -- "[Carrey] gives his best performance since ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND." 09/01/2010

Entertainment Weekly
"[With] Jim Carrey in a boundary-busting performance of spectacular commitment and delicacy....[I]t sustains a tone of compassionate hilarity in which oversize romantic gestures coexist with gigantic scams." -- Grade: A- 12/02/2010

Rolling Stone
3 stars out of 4 -- "[It's] outrageously funny. Jim Carrey swans around making nutso magic....It's one crazy love story, but Carrey and McGregor make it work by making us buy the romance as the real thing." 12/02/2010

A.V. Club
"This is CATCH ME IF YOU CAN with two middle fingers raised in the air....[The film] marvels at the impulsive, diabolical brilliance of Steven Jay Russell, a.k.a. 'King Con,' a multi-talented con artist who frustrated and embarrassed detectives and jailers for years." -- Grade: B 12/02/2010

New York Times
"With his manic glare, ferociously eager smile, hyperkinetic body language and talent for instant self-transformation, Mr. Carrey has rarely been more charismatic on the screen." 12/03/2010

Movieline
"There's plenty of sweetness at the core of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's bold, bleak little comedy I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS..." 12/03/2010

Wall Street Journal
"There's never been a movie like this one....Much of it is funny or affecting in surprising ways..." 12/03/2010

Chicago Sun-Times
4 stars out of 4 -- "Carrey makes the role seem effortless; he deceives as spontaneously as others breathe....McGregor rises to the occasion like a dazzled ingenue." 12/08/2010

Entertainment Weekly 9 of 10
I Love You Phillip Morris pulls off ingenious schemes of its own: It dramatizes a highly unusual relationship - that's an understatement - between two men in which homosexual love and sex, ardently enacted on screen in a finely tuned tour-de-force interplay between two movie stars, is just another piece of the story. And it sustains a tone of compassionate hilarity in which oversize romantic gestures coexist with gigantic scams. A film featuring lesser-known actors might have made for a ''realer'' production. But who's kiddin' whom? It's the beaming movie-star intensity of the complicated comic Carrey in the role of the dominant lover and Obi-Wan Kenobi McGregor as the gentle beloved that makes this unfettered, stranger-than-fiction picture pop. - Lisa Schwarzbaum

Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10
Phillip is in love with Steven; that's not in doubt. But he is slow to understand the depth and complexity of Steven's fabrications. He's a sweet, naive kid with a Southern accent and not the brightest bulb on the tree. He's a bystander as Steven steals a fortune from a health-care organization that has possibly never even employed him. Steven is soon back behind bars, and the movie unfolds into a series of increasingly audacious and labyrinthine confidence schemes.All of this, as I said, is based on Russell's own story, as written by Steve McVicker of the Houston Press. Russell impersonated doctors, lawyers, FBI agents and the CFO of a health-care company. He convinced prison officials he had died of AIDS and later successfully faked a heart attack. He escaped from jail four times (hint: always on a Friday the 13th). He is now serving 144 years in Texas in maximum security and solitary confinement, which seems a bit much for a man who never killed anyone and stole a lot less money than the officers of Enron. - Roger Ebert