Reviews are easy to find

The Hollywood Reporter

... heart of gold ...

Cinematical

... a painful, yet inspirational film that mustn't be missed.

The New York Times

An unfavourable review. "Lars's anguish has nothing to do with the loneliness of small towns or alienation in the modern world or even real pain; ..., he suffers without disquieting fuss or messy fluids.

Reel Views

A movie buff review, which embraces the skill displayed in practicing the movie makers art, but without considering artistic truth. "...the key here is that, while there are laughs to be had, Lars and the Real Girl is intended to be taken seriously. This is not a rude, crude, lewd comedy."

Pop Matters

A skeptical review: The film is very careful not to make Lars at all kinky or sexed: he doesn't put Bianca to the use for which she has been designed.

The Green

A strangely distanced review, perhaps more aimed at cinema owners than cinema goers.

Pajiba

The reviewer identifies the story as a fairy-tale

...and Oliver's story is even sadder in the way it crafts a beautiful, fairy-tale world for Lars as he suffers what clearly becomes a kind of delusional crisis. The townsfolk are deferent to Lars and Bianca, asking him how she's doing and inviting the pair to parties in a way that underscores the tangled emotions at work and highlights just how different this fictional haven is from the real world,...

and approves whole-heartedly

Lars and the Real Girl is a good film in the truest sense of the word: It exudes warmth and forgiveness and even a sense of atonement, of sacrifices made for the sake of reuniting what's been broken

Looking back at the ruins of my life, I recall that dating was always a nightmare, long before I fell ill. I had a pattern of hanging around in unconsumated relationships that were not progressing. On the internet today this gets called "being in the friend zone."

I lacked clarity about the fact that I was looking for a sexual relationship. Clearly, if the woman didn't fancy me, I had to move on. I couldn't change the sexual chemistry by being nice to her, but I never saw that. Somehow the circles I grew up in, moved in, the friends I chose, were not the sexy circles. Love was emasculated into romance; the missing bits went undiscussed, the suppressed emotions too embarrassing for any possibility of admitting that they were both legitimate and important.

I lived in an emasculated, fairy tale world, in which a man could buy a Real Doll and not fuck it. Well not exactly that, but an asexual world in which a man could enjoy a movie in which the central male character buys a Real Doll but doesn't fuck it. Whoops! I haven't really changed. I try, but I haven't really escaped my past.

In the film Lars is the dysfunctional product of a broken home. The home is broken by medical problems. His mother dies in childbirth.

In real life marriages break up over sexual problems. Perhaps the wife wearies of sex and does not comprehend its importance to her husband. Perhaps the marriage fails there; "lie back and think of England" is no longer fashionable marriage guidance. Perhaps the husband tries to keep the marriage together by visiting a prostitute. If it comes out it will be treated as a betrayal, not an attempt to reach a practical solution to mismatched sex drives.

Raking the embers of my life I find early choices shaping later choices, the friends I chose, the movies we watched, maintaining a psychological consistency, for better or worse. The bad choices denied legitimacy to men's sexual needs and refused to accept sex as an ordinary part of life.

Lars and the Real Girl seems familiar, cosy and, nice, in a nightmarish, Cthulhu is eating my brain, sort of way. The hormones, secretions, and lust of real life are absent from the film. I feel safe with that. Even though I've worked out that my comfort zone is a trap and I need to break free, I have nevertheless gone to the cinema and enjoyed the film. Lars broke free of his delusion, but I'm trapped in mine.

I imagine socially awkward, sexually repressed, young men seeing this movie and taking home the message that it is OK to be sexually repressed. No it isn't. The movie is evil. Embrace and enjoy your sexuality in all its squishy yuckiness. Do it now while you are young and healthy. Stick to movies that are truthful about human relationships and stay away from sexless fairy tales such as Lars and the Real Girl.