Ping Pong Playa

Mostly a little shrewder about stereotypes than your typical slacker comedy, deriving its edge from Yu and Tsai's mining of the cultural specificity of Asian-America for laughs

Charming despite requisite training sequences and a cartoonishly evil opponent.

Ping Pong Playa falters on formula only occasionally, but otherwise remains a consistently agreeable romp that strikes just the right chord of ironic sentimentally.

There is nothing charming about this man, nothing that makes him loveable, and if he was even slightly worthy of my sympathies and my understanding I certainly didn't see it watching this.

There's no resisting the movie's antic affability or its irreverence, even with Chris's unavoidable progression toward the mature appreciation of his roots.

The movie doesn't take its broad, jokey premise terribly far, but it manages to sustain a goofy-sweet comic energy and offers sly observations about assimilation, sibling rivalry and the art of competitive maternal bragging.

One way to break down cultural walls is assimilation, and that's where Ping Pong Playa has its dubious triumph: it's just about as generic as the next 'loser makes good by coaching kids' comedy...[Blu-ray]

An endless stream of near-misses.

Ace documentarian Jessica Yu's fictional feature debut ... is mostly funny and often cute, but it suffers a bit in comparison to the very similar Foot Fist Way ...

Overall the movie was enjoyable but not amazing.