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good back-story, and good acting

Beautiful, moving film.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The film unfortunately doesn't hit as hard as I had hoped. The writing in a single exchange from Horace and Pete is superior in every way. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the film, but it never hits any sort of high. Not a single conversation is thought provoking in any real manner. The questions this film raises aren't well defined, and the comedic value is missing altogether. I am not sure what Louis was attempting here, but perhaps my review is marred by revelations about Louis that I simply can't get around.

Oh man. This is painful, and not just for the surrounding scandal. Louis' work is super important to me, his TV series Louie primarily, but also his standup and Horace and Pete. This film fails dismally not just as art, but to meet the moral and philosophical standard of his best works, especially the TV series. The scenario is clear enough from the widely circulated trailer: super-successful TV writer/producer's teenage daughter becomes involved with ageing Magus, a respected director, who may or may not once have committed an act of paedophilic rape. There is a formal problem from the get-go: why is this profoundly troubling subject matter being whimsically shot and scored like a Hollywood golden age classic? The only halfway coherent or defensible answer seems to be that it's because it's not really a direct homage to the golden age, but to Woody Allen's own homages to it, a second-order homage, befitting the fact that the possibly paedophilic director is a fictionalised Allen (though temperamentally he is nothing like him). Even seen this way, it doesn't work. For subject matter this serious, you need to go to Allen precedents like Another Woman, Crimes and Misdemeanours or, most resonantly, Manhattan, which for all its monochrome high style, still has such a firm grounding in observed reality and emotional difficulty. I Love You Daddy feels more like later, trivial Allen, as if Louis, having done so well himself with observed reality and emotional difficulty, felt the best way to pay tribute to the older director was by emulating his loss of edge. All of this would be a problem no matter the subject matter, but given the sensitivity of what's under observation, it's well-nigh unforgivable. The subject of statutory rape is simply trivialised. That starts with the look and feel, but is followed through abundantly in the script. The purported victim of the alleged historic crime remains nameless and faceless ('that kid') and the protagonist's crass sidekick turns the situation into a dumb exercise in supposedly brave tactlessness, asking the director flat out whether he did it and thereby earning his respect and friendship. Meanwhile, other characters are wheeled on to further make light of this most extreme form of sexual assault and the only one who counsels caution is shown to be wrong. I don't and can't know the truth of the Allen case, except that I know a child was badly hurt and has carried that hurt through adulthood. My thoughts after seeing this are with her and others like her, as Louis' should have been and were not. I can barely understand how he thought this could have been OK, let alone how the excellent cast could have got involved. It's a mercy it didn't go on general release.

There's no way I would pay to see this film. So boring it put me to sleep. I did like seeing Ms Chloe in her bikinis. Healthy looking woman!

So much wasted talent. John Malkovich, Charlie Day, Albert Brooks, Edie Falco, Helen Hunt...no one could save this film. The writing was incredibly poor, especially for Louis C.K.'s standard. The dialogue was jilted. The direction was generic. The music was out of place. The black & white cinematography looked like a bad sitcom trying to do a one-off tribute episode to Children of Paradise. Save yourself the 2 hours and don't bother.