Metacritic reviews

Warm and funny, real and raw, Hello I Must Be Going deserves a hearty welcome from moviegoers looking for an honest and frank comedy that never forgets to help us care about its characters.

Working from a script by his wife, Sarah Koskoff, "High Fidelity" actor-turned-director Todd Louiso shapes the movie to Lynskey's rhythms.

Thanks to Melanie Lynskey's performance, the movie feels like a believably worked-out, sympathetically presented study in thirtysomething uncertainty.

If it's too subtle (and too similar to several other low-key indie romcoms) to make a big splash, it's got lovely performances and really builds strength as it goes along.

The film plays like a strenuous tug of war between the inhuman machinery of a wildly misguided plot and the low-key humanism of Melanie Lynskey's warm yet unsentimental performance.

With a digital sheen exacerbating the aura of slightness, Hello vamps along in its low indie-rom-com key toward a climactic mother-daughter moment not nearly as harrowing as the one in Lynskey's 1994 debut, but moving nonetheless.

This is ultimately a tale of affirmation, self-acceptance and second chances, and its lessons, while not unwelcome, are a bit too forced and neatly packaged to make it fully satisfying.

A credibly drawn central character is trapped inside a half-cooked dramatic stew in Hello I Must Be Going.

As a director, Louiso operates within a narrow emotional range; while not as bleak as "Love Liza," the film feels similarly monotonous and desperately needs more dramatic fluctuation.

Lynskey has raised the quality of innumerable feature films (as a soft-spoken New Republic reporter in Shattered Glass; a housewife on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Away We Go-that film's sole saving grace). So it's a delight to see this stalwart character actor move to center stage, even when the result is so by-the-numbers.