Robert Daniels of
RogerEbert.com gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "[Y]our patience with this stoner comedy will likely vary, especially as the tone becomes more oddball and the visual language adopts a trippy aesthetic. Even when the film offers the viewer a performance of the titular song, it does so in the most juvenile and idiotic tone possible. That need to subvert assumptions while mixing high and low comedy to needle rather than entertain is what makes
Ebony & Ivory pure art." In a negative review, Calum Marsh of
The New York Times wrote, "
Ebony & Ivory is a deeply unpleasant movie. Grating, juvenile and repetitive, this eccentric stoner farce written and directed by Jim Hosking feels at times more like an experiment in social conditioning than a comedy — like one of those
Stanley Milgram exercises designed to study the limits of human behavior, as if Hosking wanted to test how much suffering an audience could endure." Ben Gibbons of
Screen Rant gave it a score of 2 out of 10, writing, "There is absurdist comedy, and then there's this.
Ebony & Ivory has the quirks to match, but it misses the mark. While the type of humor on display is already extremely niche, the film digs its heels in, turning it into a grating and uncomfortable watch." ==References==