Metacritic reviews

Jane Fonda's first French-speaking film in 40 years finds her leading a joyous ensemble of septuagenarians in a sweet, thoughtful and spirited examination of how to grow old with dignity and pride in a regrettable era when senior citizens have been reduced to the status of a political agenda.

Writer-director Stephane Robelin's frothy comedy is much more "Golden Girls" hijinks than "On Golden Pond."

Well-acted and directed, with melancholy grooved insights that will only be news to the young and narcissistic, Together is a pleasant way to while away an afternoon and see some old pros in great form.

It's Pierre Richard, however, who anchors All Together, portraying Albert as stubbornly happy-go-lucky, a man bent on retaining his jovial disposition even as he's frustrated by what he's forgotten.

In its second half, the movie tips into familiar Gallic farce territory before settling for a formulaic sentimental kicker. As middling comedies go, the French approach has certain virtues. If good wine and long talks with friends can't prevent the inevitable, at least they make the waiting more tolerable.

The comedy in Robelin's movie veers from wacky and overwritten to truly, beautifully sad, especially the whimsical final sequence, which is as apt an existential tribute to the afterglow of Fonda's fabulousness as you'll see.

Getting old's a bitch. But the long-in-the-tooth quintet (Chaplin, Fonda, Guy Bedos, Claude Rich and Pierre Richard) at the center of Stéphane Robelin's featherweight French comedy has it all figured out.

The film is somewhat flimsy, tinged with the impulse to make the elderly characters just the right amount of ridiculous for the benefit of younger viewers.

If the characters are likable enough, they are underdeveloped and have little of the quirky individuality or dimension of the adventurous seniors portrayed in the superior (but sugarcoated) movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For a truthful film about those final years, you'll have to wait for Michael Haneke's heartbreaking masterpiece "Amour," which is to open in December.

Amiable but ambling.