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100As quietly dazzling as a small, very precious stone.
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91A realistic drama that looks and feels as inevitably true and moving as a good documentary.
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88All three men turn in superb and understated performances.
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88A high-wire act, treading a thin line of truth between hokum and homilies. You hold your breath, waiting to see if the filmmakers misstep, but they never do.
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83The title is too cutesy and clever, but it's about the only unsubtle aspect of this poignant, humble drama that'll probably get lost amid the multiplex bombast, but shouldn't.
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80Story of a still-grieving widower and his two troubled teenage sons is distinguished by its emotional integrity, sustained mood of aching melancholy and superbly understated performances.
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80Sternfeld has created a garden on film that opens up its blooms for us, not in the dark of the movie house, but long after we've left the theater.
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80Beautifully unemphatic small-town drama.
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75The movie is not plot-driven, for which we must be thankful, because to force their feelings into a plot would be a form of cruelty. The whole point is that these lives have no plot.
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75Very little actually happens in the movie. There are no cathartic breakdowns or soul-changing epiphanies. Instead, we're offered a collection of small moments that feel so familiar, they remind us how false most films really are.
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A well-built machine that dunks you into a big warm vat of sadness. There's no plot: It's a situation drama. Instead of punch lines, it delivers regular shots of heartbreak.
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70Sternfeld's approach is rigorously minimalist, which is a plus since the Winters family is in no way extraordinary or distinctive.
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70The boys, particularly Mr. Webber as Pete, are astonishingly good, and Ms. Monaghan, who looks like a slightly more tomboyish Liv Tyler, makes a deep impression in a minor role. Mr. LaPaglia, of the television series "Without a Trace," brings a tender gravity to the shell-shocked Jim.
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70I can't think of too many actors who could bring off Jim Winters. LaPaglia manages to convey, wordlessly, the man's inner struggle.
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60What makes Winter Solstice, a nice little Jersey vignette about a widower and his two teenage sons, so striking is writer-director Josh Sternfeld's respect for the verbal shorthand of family interaction.
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60Sternfeld not only deals empathically with his cast, he seems to know that his screenplay is not very novel or stirring; nonetheless, he wants to present these human beings in their skins, so to speak.
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58It's not sleepy, it's comatose, and writer/director Josh Sternfeld never wakes it up with anything as crass as a plot.
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50So much is unspoken and this slice of reality is so thin and slow as to make the film downright unsatisfying.
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50The film, bound to bore the socks off impatient viewers, mistakes reserve for depth and ends up hamstringing its talented cast into playing characters you never care about all that much.
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50Ultimately undercut by its fictional elements and its flat characters.
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50The movie never actually gets to winter: The title is just a clumsy play on the family's surname.
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50Despite stellar work from the cast, the movie seems as emotionally distant from its audience as its characters are from each other.
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50Oddly, the film's strengths -- its quiet, understated manner; its non-plot; the awkward speech patterns and uncomfortable pauses that suggest emotional isolation -- are also its weaknesses.
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40Sternfeld's script, developed at the Sundance screenwriters' lab, is spare to the point of stinginess; individual scenes play beautifully without adding up to anything, stranding the actors in an emotional vacuum that drains the life from their performances.
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40Neither a change of seasons nor truly wonderful performances can breathe life into the dismally enervated Winter Solstice.
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40Too sensitive for this world or any other, this stifling portrait of a family stuck in bereavement offers the painful sight of at least two highly accomplished actors frozen for lack of direction from novice writer-director Josh Sternfeld.
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25It's dreadful, but it's a special kind of dreadful -- the kind designed to appeal to intelligent people on principle.
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10The result is a numbing void, and a long, frustrating wait for something to happen.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 4
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Mixed: 2 out of 4
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Negative: 0 out of 4
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