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100The music, the cinematography, the acting choices, the daring plot leaps — not a single element is timid or safe...The Place Beyond the Pines earns every second of its 140-minute running time.
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100I think you’ll find it as fresh, original and breathlessly exciting as I did.
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100A brilliant, towering picture, The Place Beyond The Pines is a cinematic accomplishment of extraordinary grace and insight.
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91It's a story languorously told in three chapters, the first two in the late 1980s and the third 15 years later. Each could be a movie unto themselves. Together they prove Cianfrance to be an effectively unobtrusive storyteller, crafting without artifice what book critics would call a page turner.
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91That the movie succeeds both as a high-stakes crime thriller as well as a far quieter and empathetic study of angry, solitary men proves that Cianfrance has a penchant for bold storytelling and an eye for performances to carry it through.
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Apr 10, 201389The film is so velvety textured and dreamy, I would’ve stuck around for more. That is Cianfrance’s special talent.
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88This is a story about legacy, the sins of the father, the restlessness in our souls. It's powerful, it's bold, it hits you hard.
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88It is a better, more fully felt and moving picture than "Blue Valentine."
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88A riveting crime thriller, it's also a multi-generational familial saga that approaches Greek tragedy.
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88Don't let the quiet, indie stylings of The Place Beyond the Pines fool you. This is a big movie with a lot on its mind. Slowly, it unfolds into a kind of epic.
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83Cianfrance is the real deal, and anyone who can persuade talented Hollywood stars to enact nonironic, intelligent, ambitious drama should be encouraged, especially when the result is something like this.
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80An enormously satisfying film: carefully observed and consistently compelling, it feels like an instant American classic, if a minor one.
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80It's not a perfect film. There's still room for Cianfrance to grow as a storyteller. But it is entirely rewarding -- and I, for one, can't wait to see where he takes us next.
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80In trying to tell an enormous amount of story it can spread itself too thin and leave some strands feeling unfinished, but when it’s at its best, this is beautiful and bold filmmaking.
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80Gosling and Cooper use their star currency to power a slow-burn, heartsick drama. "Blue Valentine" director Cianfrance is a serious talent.
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75The acting is first-rate. Gosling masterfully fills in Luke’s motivational blanks, and Cooper nicely handles Avery’s evolution from idealist to manipulator.
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75It's a beast of a movie, an emotional roller coaster that threatens to go off the rails, and does. But Cianfrance, working from a scrappy script he wrote with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, takes you on a hell of a ride.
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75The characters are interesting and capture our sympathy and, although there are things to criticize about the final forty-five minutes, it brings the saga to a conclusion. There's a lot to like about The Place Beyond the Pines even if it isn't the feel-good movie of the spring.
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75Few actors are as riveting doing absolutely nothing, and The Place Beyond The Pines perfectly typecasts Gosling as a noir staple: the decent but rudderless drifter driven to violent and desperate action.
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75There is true beauty in the despair that pervades The Place Beyond the Pines, a film plotted out in triptych, a treatise on the moral compromises we all make to protect and provide for our loved ones.
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70The risk of telling three distinct-but-related stories is that all may not be of equal quality. That’s the case here, as the movie starts strong but gets progressively weaker, particularly in the third act.
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70The Place Beyond the Pines can’t be said to be anyone’s movie but Cianfrance’s. Structured as a triptych, the movie is novelistic, earnest and somewhat exhausting — an ambitious effort that tries to be many things. And it is definitely something: a sprawling, engaging study in fathers, sons and sins.
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70The movie is intimate in its telling, sweeping in its issues and stumbles only occasionally.
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70The movie’s soulful self-seriousness, like that of its liquid-eyed hero, can occasionally slip into self-parody. But this movie confirms my "Blue Valentine"-based suspicion that the 38-year-old Cianfrance is one to watch. He’s capable of coaxing tremendous moments from actors, he knows how to move a camera, and as this over-laden but never boring movie shows, he’s willing to operate from a place of risk.
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70One-third wonderful, The Place Beyond the Pines weakens as it unfolds for lack of what makes the early part so good.
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70The three-part story, spread over nearly two and a half hours, represents a triumph of sympathetic imagination and a failure of narrative economy. But if, in the end, the film can’t quite sustain its epic vision, it does, along the way, achieve the density and momentum of a good novel.
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70Cianfrance generally shows again that he knows how to build immersive characterizations with his actors. And while this sorrowful triptych is uneven and perhaps overly ambitious, the director displays a cool mastery of atmospherics and tone.
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63Once again, Cianfrance handles the individual scenes with menacing aplomb but, once again, the whole is much less than the sum of its parts.
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63It’s very much a film about men, their yearnings and discontents, and about the way sins tumble down from one generation to the next. It’s a bank-robber movie, too, as well as a drama about the pressures teenagers face from parents and peers. You can feel Cianfrance biting off more and more until his mouth is too full to chew.
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60The poetry in The Place Beyond the Pines can be elusive, but also easy to get lost in.
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60I never stopped being interested in The Place Beyond the Pines, and never stopped rooting for Cianfrance to make the hubristic ambition of his immense tripartite scheme pay off, even as it evidently falls apart.
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60The Place Beyond the Pines is a much bigger canvas, and scene by scene it can be riveting...But the disparate pieces never quite jell; the movie is all trees and no forest.
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60Yet after the actorcentric fireworks of Cianfrance’s "Blue Valentine" (2010), it’s impressive to see him going after a wider sociopolitical scope, one that would have been better served by a less repetitive structure.
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60The Place Beyond the Pines is ambitious and epic, perhaps to a fault.
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50While the scope of the movie is bigger, its impact is smaller. "Blue Valentine" was a precise, heartrending portrait of a marriage coming apart at the seams. The theme of his new movie is a lot harder to discern.
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50Too much of this seething drama is devoted not to characterization but to posturing.
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Mar 27, 201350It's a slow-burner that burns so slowly its wick completely fizzles out.
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50Unwieldy, overlong and overly reliant on melodramatic coincidences, A Place in the Pines is still better than it has any right to be, thanks to its cast.
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50Cool, violent, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, Gosling reprises his inexorable-loner routine from “Drive.” Cianfrance and the screenwriters Ben Coccio and Darius Marder wrote thirty-seven drafts of the script, but gave him almost nothing to say. He rides, he smokes, he knocks over banks, he loves his baby, and that’s it.
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50The segments are essentially monodramas, so sketchily written that the big moments feel less like recognizable human behavior than recognizable screenwriter overreaching.
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50Two half-stories about fathers and sons on opposite sides of the law do not a full movie make in The Place Beyond the Pines, the overlong and under-conceived reunion between “Blue Valentine” director Derek Cianfrance and lookalike star Ryan Gosling.
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Mar 15, 201350The film never reaches a climax because it's always in one, distilling the lives of its characters to their tensest moments.