Metacritic reviews

The End of the Tour is a five-day bender of a talk — a film that illuminates like few others the singular pleasure of shared discovery of one another’s sensibility. In an unassuming way, it’s a glory.

Essentially, this is a film about existential emptiness, and yet it’s beautiful and alive, as filled with humor as it is with melancholy.

Nothing and everything happen in the movie. Director James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now), working from a fluid script by playwright Donald Margulies, does justice to the book without compromising his film.

Intimate, soul-baring, and winning, The End Of The Tour is a special, lovely little gem.

Thanks to Margulies and Ponsoldt and thanks to Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, End of the Tour mostly does right by David Foster Wallace, a not insignificant feat when you're dealing with a figure who generates such passion.

What The End of the Tour tries to sell, and sells well, is that Wallace’s big heart was just not made for these times.

It teases out the distinctly modern subject of celebrity profile-writing, a rare one for the movies, detouring into avenues of attraction and envy.

It does well in using dialogue to shape its escalating tête-à-tête, but the filmmaking is too fuzzy to expand on those ideas.

[The] conversation peters out as the film grinds on, the men getting competitive and the camera nosing into their faces. Everyone involved sifts the material a little too hard for clues to Wallace's eventual suicide.

The two leads’ clashing styles might work if the film were entirely about two superficially similar people’s inability to truly find common ground. But as we’re finally intended to judge their meeting a profound connective one on at least some levels, the chemistry simply feels off.