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100One of the year's sweetest surprises. It sneaks up on you, disarming you with its modesty and tenderness, its remarkable lack of self-infatuation.
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80The most life-affirming film about death to come along in ages.
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78Coixet’s film begins with the quiet patter of rain on skin and holds that somehow sweetly sorrowful tone throughout.
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75This contemplative drama manages to dodge mawkish potholes to emerge as a strangely life-affirming work.
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75Polley's performance is pitch-perfect.
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75There are a thousand ways you can imagine My Life Without Me going gruesomely wrong but, somehow, it doesn't.
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70Successfully surmounts nearly all the challenges of making a film about a young person dying. Which means the writer-director avoids pitfalls. It is not cloying or sentimental or falsely optimistic. It avoids bathos and exaggerated emotions. Instead, the film affirms life in surprising and gratifying ways.
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70The film has a lot of humor and joy in it.
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70My Life Without Me was produced by the studio of Pedro Almodóvar, and one sees the Spanish director's influence in the way Polley edges her Madonna with a touch of the reckless sensualist.
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70A splendid cast, coupled with Isabel Coixet's deeply committed writing and direction, goes a long way to make this movie affecting to watch even it if doesn't hold up well to reflection once the lights go up.
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70With a glowing performance by Sarah Polley as the doomed woman, this Spanish-Canadian co-prod, filmed in English, is surprisingly adept at avoiding the worst cliches and most manipulative elements inherent in such a story.
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Not a gentle film. Insistent and unforgettable, it wounds on the inside, and the scars feel fresh for some time.
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70A magnificent performance by Sarah Polley illuminates every frame of this relatively upbeat melodrama.
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67This hankie-yanker is an emotional cheat.
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63I think the screenplay, written by director Isabel Coixet, is shameless in its weepy sentiment. But there is truth here, too, and a convincing portrait of working-class lives.
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63Sweet and moving, and occasionally irritating, but it's never embarrassing.
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63It has a naive, heartfelt selfishness that may offend some viewers, and a resolve that others will find intensely soothing. ''Dying's not as easy as it looks,'' cautions Ann's doctor (Julian Richings), but here it's as easy as a movie can make it.
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63Touching.
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60Excellent performances from Sarah Polley and Deborah Harry, and a sensitive script from writer-director Isabel Coixet transform what might otherwise have been little more than a disease-of-the-week cable melodrama.
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60Many will love this because it forces them to cry; others may resent it for the same reason.
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The inescapable problem with this film is that everything is precisely as you expect it. And so, cheated out of anything interesting, you just want "My Life Without Me" to be a movie without you.
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50It's hard to take this movie seriously. It's the cinematic equivalent of dotting your i's with a big heart, a very youngish view of life and death in which everything is too neatly wrapped up with a bow.
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50Despite several touching scenes, the script comes perilously close to being maudlin and, while competent, Polley doesn't have the flair to make anything special out of her big role.
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50Asks for sympathy for deplorable behavior.
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What's annoying and eventually absurd is writer-director Isabel Coixet's decision to have her heroine keep the diagnosis a secret.
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50Ms. Polley is a naturally subtle actress, and part of her appeal lies in an unusual ability to seem at once forthright and enigmatic, but this time she comes off as a bit smug.
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50The film should at least be wise and three-dimensional enough to see Ann's motivations as a source of mystery as much as heroic self-empowerment. This one-dimensional ennoblement doesn't sit quite right.
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40A weepie for audiences under the (mistaken) impression that independent movies are always more emotionally honest than Hollywood movies.
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38A maudlin hack-job.
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30It's about as phony and manipulative as a movie could be. That Polley seems true every second is maybe the strongest testament yet to her acting. It's exasperating that this movie doesn't have the courage to go places where its actress plainly has the guts to follow.
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25In short, this isn't a poignant drama about courage and imagination -- it's a contrived fantasy about courage and imagination.
User score distribution:
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[Anonymous]8The story presents a credible alternative to dieing young without being taken in by self-pity.
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ChadS.7
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HelenaL.10