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100The film is at times harrowing to watch, yet it's also wry and delicate and absorbing. It's infused with the messy excitement of imperfect passion.
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90It is worthy of comparison to the lifelike, character-rich films we cherish from that era (1970s), and is certainly one of the finest films to come out this year.
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90Naomi Watts is a tremendous movie actress. She need only sidle on camera and glance over the terrain to claim the scene. What's her secret? Like the great Isabelle Huppert, Watts doesn't radiate feelings so much as she absorbs them.
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90Easily the best American movie so far this year.
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88A revelation. One rarely sees American-made movies that are so unafraid to explore emotional cruelty and portray the consequences without positing easy answers or attaching happy endings.
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Director John Curran has masterfully managed to convey flesh and blood within the permutations of the sometimes clinical story. Enhancing the people-next-door nature of this saga were the film's smart technical contributions.
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80A sense of unease, of incompleteness, is, I think, the appropriate response to this movie. Instead of trying to fill in the blanks, Curran and Gross leave things open and ambiguous. Just like life.
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80Compassionate though it is, this is not a movie that offers much in the way of solace. It insists that there is no end to human weakness, and not much cure for it either. That's pretty strong stuff.
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Set ablaze by a startling performance by Laura Dern, it's a stark, often disturbing look at the ramifications of betrayal.
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80The movie may leave its audience feeling a little battered (some might say betrayed) as well. Still, the film's honesty, along with its refusal to pander to Hollywood happy endings, is well worth the beating.
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80The film was directed by John Curran who here does fine, close, and intimate "chamber" work. The cinematography by Maryse Alberti is of the most desirable kind: it creates mood and drama without ever being ostentatious about it. But it is the acting that truly realizes the film.
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75The film, sometimes talky and overemphatic, is also literate, erotic, brutally funny and touched by brilliance in its quartet of live-wire performances.
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75Usually American marital problems are left to the soap operas; it's nice to see them tackled by experts, piercing personas and peeling open hearts.
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75Not a deep movie. It is a very honest one, though - there's not a cheap cinematic trick in sight - and it's a graceful one, energizing its small-town story with eloquent camera work and ingenious musical touches.
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75All four performances are strong and nuanced, which makes the film oddly compelling. At the same time, all four characters are hard to like, difficult to care about. They're like car-crash victims in a demolition derby of narcissism and lies.
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75A movie for adults, of a kind that usually isn't made in America,
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An absorbing relational Rorschach test masquerading as a domestic drama, a sardonic examination of marriage and friendship that invites the audience to think for itself.
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70In Curran's hands, what might have seemed like a "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" redux gets cut into avant-garde pieces, with experimental inserts, sound effects, and wrinkles in time that add to an uneasy mood.
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Affecting and sincere in the best sense, which makes up for the whiff of anachronism and the creakiness of some of the big metaphoric moments.
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70This is not a movie to see if you're contemplating tying the knot; it's a hard slog for those of us already entwined.
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70Tony literary material, a fine cast and intelligent script and direction.
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67A pretty spot-on distillation of human weakness, but my god, must they all be so inhumane in the process?
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63At heart a rather chilly and clinical portrait of four very selfish people.
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60Though the violence in this film never becomes physical, the psychic wounds these people inflict on one another cut so deeply you wish it would. It's a grueling experience.
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60Well-acted drama.
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50The actors are better than the material.
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50It is almost completely devoid of any trace of humor. It radiates a luxurious, all-encompassing mopeyness.
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50With We Don't Live Here Anymore, it's the audience that may want to leave and start a new life.
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50You get the sense that the cheap thrill of cheating is like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. The movie feels just as inadequate emotionally and psychologically. There's a lot of outward behavior but no inner life.
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50What you're smelling is Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm" without the pathos and the punch, or John Updike's "Rabbit Redux" minus the insight and the style.
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50There's no character to root for in this movie, no potential triumphs or resounding failures, just the sense of people going through the motions because they can't bother to think of anything better to do. And that's not a lot to hang your moviegoing hat on.
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50The rest of us can pass this by, unless we're such fans of the actors - Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern and Peter Krause - that we'd watch them in anything.
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50What it lacks is the wit or even the cynicism to lighten the emotional load.
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50Like the bad fight that ends the bad marriage: ugly, messy, loud, sometimes incoherent, but ultimately necessary. You're glad when either of them -- the marriage or the movie -- is over.
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40If you're looking for a film to put you off marriage, children, affairs, and indeed life itself, look no further than this melancholic ensemble piece about listless adulterous couples in small-town New England.
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40May be very much about feelings, but it's made with a drab, juiceless, tasteful efficiency that distances us from the characters instead of drawing us closer to them.
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An hour of dour stagnation is a lot to take, even with good acting. So when the action finally does shift, toward the end of the film, it is a welcome relief.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 13
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Mixed: 3 out of 13
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Negative: 4 out of 13
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