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100Steering clear of phony melodrama and indie pretense, Baumbach captures a crisis in one family's life that, though it shakes the foundation, leaves all four Berkmans drifting toward highs and lows unknown, each of them only dimly aware that, no matter what the movies tell us, we never really come of age.
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100It's a rare film that can be convincingly tender, bitterly funny, and ruthlessly cutting over the course of fewer than 90 minutes. The Squid and the Whale not only manages this, it also contains moments that sock you with all three qualities at the same time.
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100Squid keeps you on your toes, but payoffs will have you smiling - maybe in rueful recognition of the truth - in scene after scene.
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100Treacherously funny and wrenchingly sad.
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91In hovering, The Squid and the Whale becomes its own realistic display of family entropy, as cautionary as it is educational.
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91Baumbach captures the ways in which children takes sides in a war they can't even begin to comprehend.
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91Isn't easy to watch, but it's beautifully written and acted, with a sharp eye for the small embarrassments of divorce.
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91Bitterly funny about divorce, it's even sharper and more original about intellectuals and their discontent.
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90Acutely observed, faultlessly acted, graced with piercing emotion and unsparing honesty, it will make you laugh because you can't bear to cry.
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90Both sharply comical and piercingly sad. Mr. Baumbach surveys the members of the flawed, collapsing Berkman family with sympathy but without mercy, noting their individual and collective failures and imperfections with relentless precision.
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90The Squid and the Whale is domestic tragedy recollected as comedy: a film whose catalog of deceits and embarrassments, and of love pratfalling over itself, makes it as (excruciatingly) painful as it is (exhilaratingly) funny.
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90A satirical comedy--ruthless and heartbreaking, but a comedy nonetheless. The movie is also about disintegration and the possibility of rebirth. In other words, it's a small miracle.
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89It packs a hefty emotional wallop.
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88Without jerking tears or reducing the acid content of his wit, Baumbach's humane movie gets under your skin.
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88All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid. Whales inspire major novels.
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88A great divorce movie. It's also one of the canniest comedies ever made about a certain kind of literary pretension.
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With its dry wit and all-star household, Baumbach's movie resembles Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums" without the heavy whimsy.
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88Insightful, funny-sad memoir of divorce, intellectual style and emotional rebirth.
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88The young actors' performances are particularly haunting.
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88This is one cinematic novella that stays with you for quite a while.
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88If the kids give the movie its momentum, its fascination comes from a more static source -- the father.
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83Daniels gives a career-best performance.
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80Baumbach crams an impressive amount of characterization and humor into 82 minutes.
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80Painful, funny and beautifully acted, by Jeff Daniels particularly, who gives a career-best performance.
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80Baumbach weds his verbal gifts to a fresh visual acuity that brings layers of rich detail to a portrait of a family coping, poorly, with self-inflicted change.
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80It's an unflinchingly raw and honest look at a family splitting apart, and it seldom strikes an unconvincing or inauthentic note. Though it surveys rocky adolescent emotional terrain from the safe distance of adulthood, The Squid And The Whale still resonates with the sting of a fresh wound.
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80Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth.
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80This story doesn't just belong to them anymore. This richly observed, sometimes heartbreaking movie has become ours, too.
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80The implied critique of progressive, bohemian parenting is devastating--wise and nuanced, with the painful hilarity of truth.
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75An entertaining and perceptive film with one big problem.
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75Jeff Daniels, an actor who is often relegated to inoffensive supporting roles, surprises with the power and intensity of his performance.
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70Has so much going for it -- including intelligent performances that mesh beautifully, and a keen understanding of how seemingly small moments can rattle the foundations of families -- that you walk away from it feeling it should add up to more.
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70The hole in the film isn't a reflection on Linney's performance. It's as if Baumbach, his hands full of oily whale blubber, didn't want to deal with an exploding sac of squid ink. And who can blame him, really?
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70Pic makes up in strong performances and wry observation what it sometimes lacks in narrative drive. Result is a perceptive (and unexpectedly moving) portrait of lives in crisis.
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70All four of the roles are written with pungency. There is even an implication that the two adults realize the triteness of the situation and that they--the characters, not Baumbach--want to speak from inner sources, not from a script. Baumbach pulls this off with some sting and wit.
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50The title refers to a diorama at New York City's American Museum of Natural History that depicts a whale and a giant squid locked in mortal combat.
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40The absence of any nuance in the father's character bespeaks the filmmaker's unwillingness to trust his audience. Making the movie may have been therapeutic for him, but I can't say the same about watching it.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 53 out of 90
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Mixed: 2 out of 90
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Negative: 35 out of 90
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Steve2
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AdamK.8