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In the end this movie belongs to Del Toro. He imbues Jerry with such life, such ambiguity, such unsentimental complexity and depth that you can't help but feel you're watching the most intricately mapped depiction of addiction and strained humanity the film world has ever given us.
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88Berry gives a riveting performance, but as a deeply decent man trapped in a hell of his own making, Del Toro gives the kind of career performance Berry gave in "Monster's Ball."
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88Allen Loeb's first produced screenplay is an unvarnished treatment of death and its aftermath that's unusual for a Hollywood film.
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88Emotionally challenging and honest.
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80The script is structurally similar to "21 Grams," but restrained turns and perceptive direction make this honest rather than manipulative.
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75Del Toro is the movie's force field. This is a performance you will not forget.
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75The movie is an engrossing melodrama, and it has its heart in the right place.
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75Things We Lost in the Fire finds Bier at an interesting juncture, half-Dogmatic, half traditionalist.
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75It is a testament to how well the movie is made that even the most hardened viewer might find himself tearing up at moments -- and you won't have to hate yourself in the morning.
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75Outstanding in support roles are Alison Lohman, playing a friend of Jerry's, and John Carroll Lynch, playing a neighbor who befriends Jerry.
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75The movie makes some missteps, most of them in pacing and length, and the story veers occasionally into melodrama, but it is saved by the powerful performance of Benicio Del Toro.
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75The film also has an unexpected and rich vein of humor. John Carroll Lynch -- you might know him as Norm Gunderson of "Fargo" -- is a stitch as a neighbor of the Burkes.
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75The honesty outweighs the hokiness by a fair margin.
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75The result is a film that's more credible in its building blocks than in its whole.
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75The only downside is that Bier's vision of upper-middle-class America does not always seem authentic.
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70Bier is one of the cinema's most acute observers of intimate relations, her Scandinavian reserve muting the inherent melodrama of her material, and she draws piercing, modestly scaled performances from Duchovny, Del Toro, Alison Lohman, and John Carroll Lynch.
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67Well-acted yet strangely inert, Fire explores the messy human emotions of grief, but it'd be a lot more resonant if the guy everyone's mourning weren't so fatally perfect, so unforgivably superhuman.
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63Susanne Bier is a bomb thrower. The explosives in the films by the Danish director are emotional and provoke torrents of tears, richly earned.
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63Were there such a thing as a low-carb melodrama, Things We Lost in the Fire would be it - all the tears, half the guilt.
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63Apart from the mobile camera and a moderately challenging time-jumping script, this is weepy women's cable-television fare of the tears-and-cuddles variety.
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60Things are sporadically troublesome about the film. The story goes in and out of being self-consciously earnest and ponderous, a situation that numerous tight close-ups of people's eyes does nothing to help.
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60A live-wire performance by Benicio Del Toro sparks an otherwise morose study of loss, addiction and catharsis.
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60Mr. Del Toro is a fearless actor, and his Jerry, a heroin addict lurching toward redemption, is the heart and soul, as well as the haunted, rubbery visage, of a story of grief and loss that would be fairly lifeless without him.
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58No matter what panache Bier adds, Things We Lost is still a TV-scaled tear-duct drama about a beautiful woman who pushes past sadness in her House & Garden home.
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50An unstable mix of a tearjerker, junkie-recovery story and odd-couple pairing. The film marks the American debut of Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier, whose European films show a strong affinity for stories of human frailties and of families unraveling.
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50This movie asks us to "accept the good" in life - not a bad message. But to overpraise Things We Lost in the Fire would be to accept the mediocre.
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50Benicio del Toro's a squinty-eyed genius, and the only reason this film is halfway worth seeing.
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40Although neither Ms. Berry nor Mr. Del Toro can be faulted in their scenery-chewing moments, these star turns make you uncomfortably aware that they are Oscar-conscious auditions for the Big Prize. Their naked ambition subtly contaminates a movie that, despite its fine acting, has the emotional impact of a general anesthetic.
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38Made to win awards, and I'm here to present it with one: the Cliché of the Year honors, otherwise known as the Hackney.
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30Del Toro will probably get an Oscar nod for his Jerry, because the film is so full of Oscar moments, including a cold-turkey detox bit. He rumbles and shivers and screeches and bangs his head on the wall and takes a shower in his clothes. I never believed a second of it.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 11
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Mixed: 0 out of 11
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Negative: 0 out of 11
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KhalidA.10
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LeonardP.10
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Eldon8What a powerful, beautiful movie!