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90Take This Waltz, Sarah Polley's honest, sure-footed, emotionally generous second feature. Ms. Williams, one of the bravest and smartest actresses working in movies today, portrays a young woman who is indecisive and confused, but never passive.
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89The film can feel a touch overscripted, but Polley and her actors effect true-to-life rhythms of speech.
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88As memorable as it is insightful, Take This Waltz is one of the best films of the year.
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88Known for comedy, Rogen and Silverman are the film's most delightful surprises, and their performances shine.
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80Sarah Polley's second film is a masterfully painted portrait of an ordinary marriage under threat, dominated by a central performance of exquisite subtlety and observation.
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Aug 5, 201280Some strained metaphors and character tics aside, this proves both Polley's perceptive eye and Williams' ability to explore life-scuffed emotions. Wry, risqué and real.
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80That's not to say the sobering Take This Waltz is nearly as emotionally agonizing as "Blue Valentine." Still, it's every bit as truthful in its examination of the evolution, and subsequent devolution, of love.
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80Williams is so good, so natural, so believable in the role that it's easy to forgive her character -- or at least wish her well. That's no small feat, because she can drive you crazy.
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80Somehow it is the waiting - for the fall that you expect is coming, for the marriage you figure will fall apart - that makes Take This Waltz one to make room for on your dance card.
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80Unfortunately for Polley, Take This Waltz is a good film serving mainly to remind us that "Away From Her" is a great one.
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Jun 28, 201280Take This Waltz is an unusually kind film about infidelity -- not because it sidesteps or shortchanges heartbreak, but because it doesn't let any one of its characters bear the full burden of blame.
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80Take This Waltz is frank, erotic, often very funny and sometimes startling, with an underlying tragic sensibility.
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80Despite a few tonal and structural missteps, this intelligent, perceptive drama proves as intimately and gratifyingly femme-focused as Polley's 2006 debut, "Away From Her."
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75Michelle Williams is a beautiful moper.
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75The actors are excellent. Rogen falls very comfortably into the role of a 29-year-old who has fallen very comfortably into a living thing - a marriage - and stopped working on it.
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75There is a lot of truth in this portrait of a marriage running out of the will to survive.
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75Suffice it to say, the issues here are bigger than one woman's story.
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Jun 29, 201275Canadian actor Kirby's bedroom-eyes shtick is infused with just the right amount of creepiness, as Polley's film plays with the blurry line between soulful romantic obsession and just plain stalking.
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75The film's emotional truth and honesty allows us to forgive a great many flaws.
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70There are enough unexpected delights, such as repurposing "Video Killed the Radio Star" during a critical moment between Margot and Daniel, to keep us interested in their drawn-out, teasing, tantalizing courtship.
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67"Waltz" requires you to be on board with it from the start and doesn't often enough rouse itself to magnetize you if you're not.
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67Take This Waltz is simultaneously a coming-of-age film, a love story, a breakup story, and an indie quirkfest, and it tries to do so many things at once that it can't hit many of its marks cleanly. But at least it's never boring, and rarely predictable.
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Jun 27, 201267By never standing back from Margot, the movie courts vagueness as well.
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63The new movie's a visual achievement and a narrative muddle: A color-drenched story of lust, love, and infidelity, it suffers from a vagueness that may be the point but that feels accidental.
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63At best, it shows how intense sexual attraction can be a form of temporary insanity.
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63Take This Waltz is full of chance encounters, some less likely than a lobby with nine hundred windows or a bed where the moon has been sweating.
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60The troubling turns the story takes, which are meant as a rebuke to happily-ever-after stereotypes, are much more interesting in conception than they are in execution.
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Jun 23, 201260Williams embodies Margot's inner turmoil with an unfussy sense of terrified instability.
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58Polley has a sometimes graceful understanding of emotional temperate zones and Williams, when she isn't being zombielike, is touching. But Margot comes across as such an elusive and unsympathetic twit that you wonder why we should care about her.
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50Williams is hampered by her character's limitations. What results is a mannered tale of an immature, empty vessel.
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50So rich is that visual yield, however, that it needs no verbal boost. Yet, from the moment that Margot says to Daniel, while sitting next to him on a plane, "I'm afraid of connections," the dialogue strains and grunts so hard for effect that it threatens to pull a muscle.
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40Is there another actor working today whose face registers the extraordinary range of emotions Michelle Williams can display? Even in a film as false as Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz, her swiftly shifting expressions feel unerringly true.
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Jun 23, 201240This sophomore feature is a stumble backwards in terms of maturity.
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20In theory, these are twentysomethings we're talking about. But they walk and talk like fortysomethings or fiftysomethings, such is their dullness and self-absorption.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 18
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Mixed: 3 out of 18
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Negative: 3 out of 18
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