On the
review aggregator website
Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 40% based on reviews from 136 critics, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The website's critics consensus states, "Too many elements from better Woody Allen films are being recycled here."
Metacritic, which uses a
weighted average, assigned the film a score of 43 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences surveyed by
CinemaScore gave the film a grade C− on scale of A to F.
Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, and wrote: "At a time when so many American movies keep dialogue at a minimum so they can play better overseas, what a delight to listen to smart people whose conversation is like a kind of comic music."
James Berardinelli of
ReelViews wrote: "
Anything Else may not be the second coming of
Annie Hall, but it has more wit and substance than almost every post-college romance that sees the inside of a projection booth".
David Stratton of
Variety wrote: "The younger casting brings a freshness to the material and, with Allen as the weird mentor, there are plenty of laughs, even if the pacing's slow and the running time over-extended." Mike Clark of
USA Today was critical of the characterizations, the music, the length ("brutally overlong"), but praised the actors for their performances: "It's asking a lot of audiences to spend nearly two hours with characters as screen-unfriendly as the ones played by Biggs and Ricci, though both actors (and especially Ricci) do what they're asked to do." Clark also says the film "sounds as if it ought to be funny, but like so much else here, intent and execution keep missing each other." and complains that the misery of the story is not tempered by sufficient laughs. In August 2009, it was cited by
Quentin Tarantino as one of his favorite 20 films since 1992, when his career as a filmmaker began.
Leonard Maltin, in his
TV, Movie, & Video Guide, gave the film a "BOMB" rating (the only Allen-directed film ever to receive this citation), and called it "a rare misfire for Woody, but still a big one". In 2016, film critics
Robbie Collin and Tim Robey of
The Daily Telegraph ranked
Anything Else as one of the worst movies by Woody Allen. ==Soundtrack==