Metacritic reviews

Brydon and Coogan are the same gifted improvisers they’ve always been, shooting the breeze until it sweeps them into some absurd playacted scenario.

Director Michael Winterbottom hasn’t just delivered the funniest movie of the year, but also a comedy that casts its characters in a harsh new light.

The film deepens the melancholic, existential notes from end of The Trip to Italy, and continues to evolve with its characters emotionally.

Ultimately, fans of the previous two films will get all they crave from The Trip to Spain, which feels like something of a rarity in franchising: These movies have yet to fizzle out and lose their appeal or run out of creative space to explore.

For fans of the series, The Trip to Spain gives one a wholehearted meal of all they could possibly desire.

That The Trip to Spain is unabashedly more of the same is good news…but not entirely good news.

The good news for fans is that The Trip to Spain is no Godfather III. The moderately bad news is that this sometimes hilarious outing is the one in which the conceit comes to resemble a lushly produced, irregularly broadcast TV series.

Conversational drama (ala Linklater’s Before franchise), plates piled with last-meal dinner fantasies, unparalleled improv – third time is still the charm, but Michael Winterbottom lets the stew boil a bit too long.

What Coogan and Brydon are doing in these films is an acquired taste, but if they want to continue on doing them then they’re going to need to cut down and edit their interminable actor impressions.

The premise of Michael Winterbottom's series has devolved from moderately diverting to actively stifling.