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100It is beautiful, and it is difficult to watch. It is heartwarming, and it is heart-wrenching. It is absorbing, and it's unsettling.
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100Sounds depressing, but Blue Valentine is a reminder that well-measured and expertly acted pain is as thrilling to watch as 3-D spectacle.
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100Extraordinary and beautiful.
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100Blue Valentine is lushly touching and gorgeously told.
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100Gosling and Williams have the most palpable chemistry of any screen couple this year, never striking a false note in this achingly tender tale of a love that implodes before our eyes.
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100Halfway into Blue Valentine, a work so beautifully acted and emotionally honest it is my choice for best movie of the year, there's an amazing flashback scene you hope never ends.
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100It's an emotionally claustrophobic drama, played with frayed nerves and raw emotions, and it serves as an unrelenting glimpse into relationship hell. It could easily have devolved into sweaty, pretentious melodrama or ersatz John Cassavetes if Cianfrance and his actors didn't maintain perfect control over the material.
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100Blue Valentine has a quiet, resigned wisdom to it.
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100Blue Valentine is about real life, warts and all, over narrative conventions like action and plot mechanics. It is brutal, compassionate, beautiful in its ugliness and one of the bravest films of the year.
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90Once it's done, you feel terrible for these people, for their lives, for their daughter, especially. Is that entertainment? To each his own, but it is compelling and, yes, rewarding.
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90Williams plays this tired, disillusioned, chronically angry woman without a trace of actorly vanity. It's a performance noteworthy not just for its intensity but for Williams' ability to communicate inner experience at a micro-level of detail.
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90Here's one vote for the most affecting, anguishing, revealing and prophetic scene of the movie year-and yes, it's all of those things at once in a powerful film that alternates between moments of earlier happiness and later pain.
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90An intimate, gorgeous and wrenching portrait of a working-class marriage in what may be a state of terminal decay.
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90Cianfrance and his actors, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, have not made a cold or schematic film. They aim instead for raw emotional experience, one that's full of insight into the ways a relationship can go astray, but mostly feels like a slow-motion punch to the gut.
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88Two superb actors etch an unflinching portrait of a young marriage doomed never to grow old.
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88The cumulative experience leaves an aftertaste that, although not bitter, is too strong to be easily washed away. That's the mark of a worthwhile motion picture.
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88It's true that the movie is both emotionally violent and sexually explicit. Yet these scenes from a marriage are crafted with such attention to detail and overarching honesty that Blue Valentine touches the heart.
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88After 30 minutes, I wondered why I was watching a drama about a quarrelsome couple who seemed so obviously wrong for each other. After 60 minutes, I knew. After 90 minutes, I cared. By the end, I was riveted.
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88There isn't a moment in the entire film that doesn't feel genuine.
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88Derek Cianfrance, the film's writer and director, observes with great exactitude the birth and decay of a relationship. This film is alive in its details.
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88A small but shattering film that marks its writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, as an artist of real depth, observes relationship dynamics at a molecular level, welling with as much understanding as Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage."
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88Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams give two of the most explosive and emotionally naked performances you will see anywhere. Just know you're in for a workout.
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85The faces of these performers - particularly Williams' - are the key to Blue Valentine.
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80The performances are so gripping that the movie works despite its diagrammatic structure, which focuses on ironic rhymes between past and present and leaves out the entirety of the couple's marriage.
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Jan 3, 201180A raw but beautiful picture of love uniting and dividing: tender, real and heartfelt.
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80Blue Valentine leaves you with the shattering vision of its truest victim-the one who'll someday look for safety in places it might not be. And the psychodrama will go on and on …
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80Nothing out of the ordinary happens in Blue Valentine, and that, together with the vital, untrammelled performances of the two leading actors, is the root of its power.
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80The scenes cut so close to the emotional bone that you can understand why they might cause a panic amongst MPAA boardmembers, although of course, it's nothing to be afraid of: just the realism of love in its varied forms.
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80On balance, this is a meaty, strongly realized dramatic work of considerable accomplishment.
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75Writer-director Derek Cianfrance, who with Blue Valentine makes an astonishing debut.
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75It's Williams you never question, who makes every detail and close-up and impulse natural. She's spectacularly good.
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75It's a gritty, almost ugly to look at film, and Cianfrance isn't shy about including a random blast of unwarranted shaky footage.
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67Those moments, as affecting as they are, can't surmount the overworkshopped feel of the whole film.
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63There's a loose, vérité vibe here, and times when both Williams and Gosling root down deep to deliver something resonant and true. But this modern-day kitchen sink drama is ultimately too painful, too labored, to care much about at all.
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60That meandering dialogue can be difficult to control, and at times the film feels as if the director has stepped away from the vehicle, leaving it to veer off the path. Still, it's an experiment that works more than it fails by giving Gosling and Williams both the motive and the means to create something extraordinary, a valentine that actually says something true about being in love.
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60The kind of grim, character-based movie that needs a strong performer to anchor it. Director Derek Cianfrance has been fortunate enough to land two: Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling.
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50It wallows in misery so much that the two-hour experience ends up being about as much fun as a real divorce.
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50All the movie's good style goes to waste on a not terribly compelling conceit and loosely sketched characters.
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50The film's time structure is splintered into shards of past and present, which is probably just as well – a strictly narrative chronology would make this wallow seem even sloggier.
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50Cindy and Dean remain, for all their sustained agony and flickering joy, something less than completely realized human beings. Mr. Cianfrance's ingenious chronological gimmick, coupled with his anxious, clumsy plotting, leaves them without enough oxygen to burst into breathing, loving life.
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Dec 28, 201050Even when transparently plumbing for depth, Cianfrance's film is frustratingly surface-bound in ways that reflect, if not out-and-out misogyny, then at least a lack of interest in imbuing his female character with the rich interior life and complicated morality he gives his male lead.
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Dec 21, 201050Ultimately, the heavy-handed and annoyingly obvious aesthetic wears thin.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 42 out of 53
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Mixed: 5 out of 53
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Negative: 6 out of 53
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