Metascore

Universal acclaim - based on 36 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 75 Ratings

  • Starring: Gordon Pinsent, Julie Christie
  • Summary: This beautiful yet unconventional story of a couple coming to grips with the onset of memory loss is adapted from celebrated author Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." (Lionsgate)
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 35 out of 36
  2. Negative: 0 out of 36
  1. 100
    Anyone 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.
  2. One of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.
  3. Reviewed by: John DeFore
    80
    The pain of watching a spouse succumb to Alzheimer's is given a particularly deep and sensitive treatment in Away From Her.
  4. Reviewed by: Olly Richards
    60
    It's Sarah Polley through and through: slightly too glum for its own good, but reeking of quality and feeling.

See all 36 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 35 out of 46
  2. Negative: 8 out of 46
  1. averyc
    10
    This is a minor masterpiece. This isn't a film about illness. It's a film about love and a film about, what Proust always knew to be, the great tragedy of forgetting. What does the player king in 'Hamlet' say? "Memory is but the slave of passion?". It's about how people sometime trade love for the solace of similarity. It's about the fact that sometimes the most loving gesture one can make is to let the other go. Regardless of how much you can bench or how straight you drink your Maker's, if you've recently left a long, troubled relationship, you will cry and cry. Nobody knows how to say goodbye. Collapse
  2. JohnA
    8
    'Away From Her' is not so subtle as it is heartbreaking.
  3. [Anonymous]
    7
    Beautifully acted by Julie Christy but some elements of the story seemed formulaic and unreal.l
  4. DianaM
    4
    there are moments of transcendence here (the two most memorable being the aerial shot of christie in the snow field, and the use of neil young's "harvest moon"), but without any believable timetable, the whole thing turns supermaudlin, confusing, and frankly, tedious. i kept waiting and waiting for fiona to say it'd all been just a well-acted hoax, that her rapid memory loss was aimed either to make grant move on with his life, or to finally punish him for that buried-but-not-forgotten-and-thus-not-buried-deep-enough indiscretion he made with a college student in the 70s. and speaking of which....
    ????!!? those flashbacks are shady. at one point i actually thought the girl would rise from the past--or from the dead--a la "what lies beneath." i could name a number of other "huhs?", if asked. maybe there wasn't enough time to show fiona's brain slowly unhinge and let the flood wash away grant's love. but one month?? one month in which she learns new things, suffers no fears, no violent outbursts, but loses every morsel of her life before??!! i will admit christie is exquisite. i could stop wishing i'll be half so earthy when/if i get old. olympia dukakis is hilarious, as always, though i don't think she was trying to be. oh, but i do love watching her mask break. polley shouldn't have been so verbatim in her translation from the short story. she needed either to expound on grant's affair, or do away with it completely. faboo camera work, however. all four points for that.
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See all 46 User Reviews

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