Hunting Venus

Sam Wollaston of The Guardian felt the film "started promisingly" and "ended splendidly", however concluded that Hunting Venus "didn't really work because it's asking too much of one joke to keep it going for nearly two hours, and pastiche isn't that funny anyway, is it?" He added: "When you've got Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey in something, you expect it to be as good as Men Behaving Badly. Which it wasn't. And Jane Horrocks as Cassandra was better than both of them."^[2]

Robert Hanks of The Independent commented that the film had a lot of "incidental pleasures" along with "one or two deft jokes about the 1980s - plus a handful of star cameos". However, he felt that the film "seemed oddly short of allusions" to the 1980s and contained "some very old-fashioned attitudes". Hanks summarised: "What the film did get right was the way that nostalgia lends cheap music its potency, and elevates our personal tragedies over world events - for the characters here, the summer of 1982 was about losing your virginity and "Hungry Like the Wolf" getting into the charts, not about the Falklands War. But it didn't need to take two hours to make that point; this was a story of lost times in a way it didn't intend."^[3]

• Hunting Venus at IMDb
• BFI TV & Film Database - Hunting Venus