a Little Bit", and Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky". Release Warner Bros. owns the rights for the film's North American distribution, while Universal Pictures owns the rights to release the film outside of North America. The film was released in North America on October 2, 2009. Its world premiere occurred two weeks earlier at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival on September 14, 2009. The DVD and Blu-ray were released on January 19, 2010. Gervais briefly promoted the DVD during his hosting duty at the 67th Golden Globe Awards in a joking manner, referring to its modest box office results. Reception Critical reception Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 56% of 188 critics have given the film a positive review, with an average rating of 5.9/10. The site's consensus says, "It doesn't quite follow through on its promise, and relies too heavily on shopworn romantic comedy tropes, but The Invention of Lying is uncommonly sly and funny." On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from film critics, the film has a rating score of 58 based on 31 reviews, suggesting "mixed or average reviews". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film three and a half stars out of four saying "in its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, [it] is a remarkably radical comedy". Xan Brooks of The Guardian was also favourable, giving the film four out of five stars, although he was critical of some aspects: "It is slick and it is funny. But it is also too obviously schematic, while that romantic subplot can feel awfully synthetic at times." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it a "mostly funny if melancholic defense of deceit" that "looks so shoddy that you yearn for the camerawork, lighting and polish of his shows, like the original The Office, because, really, these days TV rarely looks this bad." In some scenes, Dargis says "lying becomes a means to transcendence, an escape from the quotidian, from our oppressive literal-mindedness, from our brute selves. For the most part, though, Mr. Gervais prefers to shock us with our own brutality...[with] unvarnished truths [that] begin to feel heavy, cruel." Box office The film opened at #5 with $7,027,472 behind Zombieland, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in its third weekend, the Toy Story/Toy Story 2 3-D double feature, and Surrogates in its second weekend. The film has