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100As in a good European film, shots are allowed to breathe. The focus is on character and human emotion. At the same time, the movie shows an American concern for pace and story development. The result is the best of both worlds.
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91James Gray's Two Lovers really is a '70s movie, in the mode of such raw, unfiltered character studies as "The Panic in Needle Park," "Wanda," and "Fat City."
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91Joaquin Phoenix is as good as he has ever been in James Gray's Two Lovers, a discomfortingly honest drama about the frustrations of love and desire.
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90Gray's peculiar accomplishment here is to turn this story into an intense emotional drama, beautifully photographed and profoundly ambiguous, suspended somewhere between realism and psychosexual allegory.
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90For a filmmaker who has made his reputation with such crime thrillers as "Little Odessa" and "The Yards," James Gray reveals an unexpected gift for the mysteries of romance.
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88The whole movie is so well-cast and performed that we watch it unfolding without any particular awareness of "acting."
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88The movie is supremely nonjudgmental and balanced.
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80Phoenix plays the romantic lead with great intelligence and enormous charm, making his character's conflict utterly believable, and Paltrow positively glows as the radiant shiksa who dazzles him.
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80Although Paltrow is radiant (and she nails the character's ditzy sense of entitlement), it's Phoenix's movie. He is, once again, stupendous, and stupendous in a way he has never been before.
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Themes of loneliness, alienation and unrequited love are not new, but there is always that sense of the unexpected in Phoenix that keeps you curious.
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80However moody, though, Two Lovers didn't strike me as a downer, for the simple reason that it wells with sights and sounds that are guaranteed to lift, not sink, the spirits.
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80The performances are solid: pulling inward in every scene, Phoenix taps into the New York loneliness that defined Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, and Rossellini is excellent as the worried mother, who doesn't have much to say but watches her beloved boy like a cat.
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78Two Lovers is an intensely felt, character-driven film, and there's no stronger character onscreen – not even Leonard – than Leonard's wise, Jewish mother, Ruth, played with effortless, pure perfection by Rossellini.
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75The film's secrets unfold slowly, allowing Phoenix and Paltrow -- a luminous fusion of grace and grit -- to build a relationship in full. The script, by Gray and Richard Menello, is inspired by Dostoevsky's "White Nights."
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A small, delicate concoction of moods and moments, far quieter than all the current Phoenix-related hoopla. But his heartbreaking performance may incline audiences to think of him in a new light, or at least return to thinking of him in the old one.
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75A throwback in style, pace, and storytelling to the 1970s and the downbeat mood pieces of directors like Bob Rafelson.
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75Joaquin Phoenix gives a superbly raw and excruciatingly vulnerable performance.
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75In the movies, romantic love conquers all. In reality, it's a little different, and that's what Gray is trying to show.
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75Two Lovers is two movies – the complex, alluring one we want, and the simple, pedestrian one we'll settle for.
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75The movie feels operatic at times. Tempestuous arias play on the soundtrack, and Puccini figures directly.
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75The characters are all a little too old for this sort of drama, and they know it, but that makes Two Lovers as much about last chances as new loves.
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75Not always believable, but the film has a moody expressiveness that stays with you.
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70The flaws in Two Lovers are inseparable from its strengths. You could, I suppose, criticize the movie for being too sincere; too generous to its imperfect, self-deluded characters; too absorbed in their small crises and disproportionate reactions. But that criticism might sound a lot like praise.
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70This very New York tale is old-fashioned in good ways that have to do with solid storytelling, craftsmanship and emotional acuity.
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70The movie's chief value is to preserve Phoenix at the height of his wary physical grace, which recalls a young Marlon Brando.
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63The storytelling here is at times as awkward as its hero, and since it is a Gray film Two Lovers takes itself dreadfully seriously. Yet it's one of the few movies I've seen recently that improves on a second viewing, in part because Phoenix does such remarkably subtle work.
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63The dynamic between Leonard and his lovers is uncomfortable and not in the good way like Ricky Gervais's dancing.
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60Director James Gray is best known for hard-edged dramas like "Little Odessa," so it's surprising to find he has such a well-developed romantic side. This isn't your average date-night flick, though.
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60This is a gentle, understated character-driven piece that has more in common with European romantic dramas than those made in this country as a rule.
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60Fine performances -- notably from Phoenix -- still don't make this an easy sell. But it is atmospheric, accomplished and intense.
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58Phoenix makes an interesting case of Leonard's twitchiness and mooning, but neither Paltrow nor Shaw is particularly credible as a Brooklynite, and Rossellini and Moshonov seem like they've wandered in from another film altogether.
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50Touching in its absurdity, the movie is what the French, if they didn't love Gray so much, might term agréablement ridicule.
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38The only possible interest the movie will inspire in anyone comes when Paltrow flashes a breast toward the end, far too late to pump any excitement into an aggressively boring film that gurgles with self-indulgence.
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Positive: 6 out of 8
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Mixed: 1 out of 8
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Negative: 1 out of 8
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