Critical reception
No Strings Attached received mixed reviews. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 49%, based on 165 reviews, with an average rating of 5.2 out of 10. The site’s consensus reads: “It benefits from the presence of Natalie Portman and director Ivan Reitman’s steady hand, but No Strings Attached doesn’t have the courage or conviction to follow through on its ribald premise.” On Metacritic, the film received a score of 50 out of 100, based on 36 reviews, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.
Critic David Edelstein described No Strings Attached as a film with “a supposedly feminist veneer. (that) never makes the case for Emma’s point of view. It’s almost a feminist backlash movie, and it didn’t have to be. There are plenty of reasons for brilliant young women, especially with the stress of a medical career, to approach time- and emotion-consuming relationships warily.” He expressed disappointment on overuse of stock characters, as well as Reitman’s “heavy-handed” direction and a story that is ultimately “corny and contrived and conservative.” A. O. Scott called the film “not entirely terrible. high praise indeed, given that this is a film aspiring to match the achievement of 27 Dresses, When in Rome, and Leap Year”; according to Scott, the film is “Love & Other Drugs without the disease”, a film whose pleasures “are to be found in the brisk, easy humor of some of Ms. Meriwether’s dialogue and in the talented people scattered around Ms. Portman and Mr. Kutcher like fresh herbs strewn on a serving of overcooked fish.” Scott considered “the film’s great squandered opportunity-and also the source of some of its best comic moments-is that Ms. Gerwig and Mindy Kaling in effect share the role of Emma’s zany sidekick. How can this be? Why are these 
two entirely original and of-the-moment performers marginal players in this agreeable, lackluster picture and not stars of the year’s greatest girl-bromance. To imagine Ms. Kaling and Ms. Gerwig in a remake of Thelma and Louise or the Wedding Crashers is to experience an equal measure of frustration and hope. Why can’t we have a few movies like that and not quite so many like this?”
British newspaper The Telegraph named No Strings Attached one of the ten worst films of 2011, saying “No Strings Attached is nominally a raunchy romantic comedy, but Natalie Portman betrays so little indication of enjoying herself you’d be forgiven for thinking we were watching deleted scenes from Black Swan.”
Home media
No Strings Attached is a 2011 American romantic comedy film directed by Ivan Reitman and written by Elizabeth Meriwether. Starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, the film is about two friends who decide to make a pact to have “no strings attached” casual sex without falling in love with each other. The film was released in the United States on .
After first meeting at a summer camp as teenagers, Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher) run into each other a few times as young adults but never keep in touch. Emma becomes a d a production assistant for a musical television show. Adam’s father Alvin (Kevin Kline), the well-known star of a former hit television comedy series, has begun a romance with Adam’s ex-girlfriend, Vanessa (Ophelia Lovibond). The next morning, he wakes on a sofa wearing nothing but a small towel. It turns out that he texted Emma and then came to the apartment she shares with some other residents—Patrice (Greta Gerwig), Shira (Mindy Kaling), and Guy (Guy Branum). Once there, he took off all his clothes and then passed out. Emma leads Adam to her bedroom to retrieve his missing pants and they end up doing the dirty.
