A Beautiful Life received poor reviews from the twelve sources noted by the Rotten Tomatoes website.
The New York Times called it a "laughably clichéd dive into sexual masochism", and
The Village Voice saw it as a "misery pile up ... about broken souls and crossed paths destined for the trash heap. Scream, smash, slap, cry, repeat."
Slant gave it a half-star out of four, saying that "its awfulness [comes] in so many forms that it's hard to single out just one appalling example".
Variety felt that it provided "unintentional laughs by the barrel", and predicted that the film would be a
box office bomb.
NPR said that although the film deals with some serious topics, the random nature of characters and controversies made it hard to appreciate them, describing it as "too earnest to be a hoot, and too amateurish to be anything else". ==References==