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100Anyone who could read Munro's original story and think they could make a film of it, and then make a great film, deserves a certain awe.
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100One of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.
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100To say it is about a debilitating disease is as reductive as saying "Little Miss Sunshine" is about a beauty pageant. Both are intimate stories of family ties that bind but sometimes also choke.
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100Rarely has love at any age been depicted so honestly on screen. For such a fully realized portrait to be created by a 28-year-old first-time director is even more remarkable.
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100Extraordinary--delicate, seriously disturbing, and lovely.
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100For a movie about the importance of memory, Away From Her is appropriately sophisticated in its treatment of time. Polley has broken the chronological story into three sections of unequal length and woven them together, approximating our own mercurial journeys through the past.
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It's a precociously assured and mature work, at once humble and bold, that keeps faith with Munro's precise, graceful prose while tailoring its linear progression into shapely cinematic form.
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90Poignant, wise and unafraid -- just the sort of film for a young person, or any person, for that matter, to make.
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90I can't remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.
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90For anyone who grew up worshiping at the shrine of Julie Christie, the notion that she could be playing a white-haired woman drifting into senility is a jolt to the system. But her radiance, beauty and talent are undiminished: she's hauntingly, heartbreakingly good.
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90The movie, Polley's feature début, is a small-scale triumph that could herald a great career.
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89A phantom of a movie whose beautiful flakes fall into the deep crevices of memory long after the seasons change.
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88All the acting is first-rate -- Dukakis gives major dimensions to a supporting role. And Christie, a Sixties screen goddess in "Darling" and "Doctor Zhivago," shows that her spirit and grace are eternal. She's a beauty. So is the movie.
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88As this intimate, beautifully observed film unfolds, you realize that the story's themes -- the nature of love, the role of sex in relationships and the ways in which we learn to make peace with our guilty consciences -- are relevant no matter what age you happen to be.
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88Even those who've long noted Polley's intelligence on screen will be amazed by the perception she displays as a filmmaker.
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88Julie Christie is simply astounding as a woman slipping into the ravages of Alzheimer's in Sarah Polley's deeply affecting and artfully crafted Away From Her.
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88A heartbreaking elegy to mature love that honors the lovers and the long, neurodegenerative tango that is their last.
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88A sad and sometimes funny tale of Alzheimer's, love and loss.
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88Does the finest job of any film in painting a believable portrait of aging, capturing the sadness, confusion, anxiety and defiance of the early stages of dementia.
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88With a tranquil fearlessness, it goes beyond the death of memory, to see what might be found in the unexplored country beyond. The answer is both frightening and comforting: More love. Unspecified love. Universal love.
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88A film rich in paradoxes. Much of the film's style is dreamy, from the snow-covered Ontario landscapes suggestive of a blanket of forgetfulness, to Julie Christie's pale, intoxicating beauty, to the ambient musical score.
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88A director needs to know how to pace the tale, where to place the camera, how to draw out a shy actor or get out of the way of a strong one. Those skills are rarer than you'd think. Sarah Polley, who never wrote or directed a feature film before Away From Her, has them all.
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83There's nothing messy or unkempt about the beautifully, quietly heartbreaking story of unconditional love and emotional sacrifice.
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83A quiet, heartfelt story of love and loss.
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83Has its heartbreaking moments and its surprise giggles, particularly thanks to Ron Hewat's minor role as a former hockey play-by-play announcer now narrating his nursing-home life.
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83Given the subject, the movie is too romanticized, and Christie's eyes remain too sharp here to convincingly convey someone whose memory is fast slipping away. Much of it is powerful anyway.
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The pain of watching a spouse succumb to Alzheimer's is given a particularly deep and sensitive treatment in Away From Her.
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80Julie Christie gives a fabulous performance of mysterious, unclear depth as Fiona.
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80Polley captures the brisk, cheerful fascism of nursing-home existence with merciless clarity; if you've visited a parent or grandparent in one of those places, you may want to laugh and cry in the same moment.
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80Away From Her is a twilight-of-life love story, one that harshly demolishes our romantic notions of love and loyalty, then replaces them with something deeper and, finally, more consoling.
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80What Away From Her achieves is quite admirable-- a low-key, intelligent setting for performances marked by those same qualities.
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80A feature film that's often astringent on the surface, yet deeply and memorably stirring.
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75A tender movie about a poignant and difficult subject.
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75Munro's stark lily needed none of this gilding.
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75The actors are all perfect and yet not. Christie, most obviously, is simply too gorgeous, even when she's meant to be rattled and lost; Pinsent is too credibly stolid; Dukakis never vanquishes an impression of sourness. These may be quibbles, but they add up.
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60It's Sarah Polley through and through: slightly too glum for its own good, but reeking of quality and feeling.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 35 out of 46
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Mixed: 3 out of 46
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Negative: 8 out of 46
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averyc10
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AnnV.2Not really about Alzheimer's. It is about a guilty husband. Slow, pretty boring. No truth about dementia in this show.
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JohnA8'Away From Her' is not so subtle as it is heartbreaking.