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100It's rare to get a good movie about the touchy adult relationship of a sister and brother. Rarer still for the director to be more fascinated by the process than the outcome. This is one of the best movies of the year.
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100Satisfying in every respect, it's a piece of blue-collar chamber music, never treating the characters cheaply, allowing them a complex entwinement of emotions.
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It's simply a quiet and heartbreaking look at the dynamics of one family. That's the beauty of it.
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100Beautiful, compassionate, articulate domestic drama.
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100There may be bigger, costlier, weighter films this year. There's none lovelier.
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100Few films have explored the complicated bonds of love and resentment between brother and sister with such delightful honesty.
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100The best American movie of the year. Has a subtext so powerful that it reaches out and pulls you under. Even when the surface is tranquil, you know in your guts what's at stake.
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100A humanistic gem of a movie, with unforgettable performances from Linney and Ruffalo.
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91It's a movie about having a sibling and all of the pain, joy, love and anxiety that that entails: a movie, in other words, for almost everyone.
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91A drama that embraces the ambiguities and contradictions of family ties and human nature in all its irrational glory.
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90In this modest but brilliant little movie, we find ourselves immersed in life itself.
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90It's a rare thrill -- in this cinematically hollow year.
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90One of the best pictures I've seen all year. Funny, touching, even inspiring at times.
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90Melancholy little gem of a movie.
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90Maybe these lives are, objectively speaking, inconsequential. But they have a resonance that big, sappy "relationship" pictures ought to envy.
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90A sensitive, intimate, enormously touching drama.
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88Honest, poignant and very funny, full of memorable, moving moments.
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88One of the most rewarding and engaging movies of the year. Don't miss it.
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88A small but moving film that gets the details right (life in a sleepy burg, sidewalk chats between old high school pals) and gets at the heart of human longing for family, for love.
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88The best drama you've seen about Anytown, USA, since "American Beauty."
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85It's the sum of things not spoken, things too painful to express, that's the heart of this quietly moving drama.
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80(Linney and Ruffalo) are just beautiful enough, in fact, to be in the movies and still remain convincing as authentic folk, and their performances are tremendously moving.
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80With warm humor and perceptive writing, director Kenneth Lonergan displays a gift for creating realistic characters and a compelling story.
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78Writer/director Lonergan succeeds at capturing eloquently the disappointments of growing up and growing old. But he isn't always successful at reining in the schmaltz.
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75Wittily written and deliciously acted, Lonergan's debut film is a clear cut above the average.
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75It's a compassionate story about what makes people tick and what really matters.
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70Beautifully acted, minutely observed story.
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70A subtle and often surprising study of the relationship between damaged adult siblings, full of mordant humor and dramatic invention.
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60Seems like a TV movie. A well-written, sympathetically acted TV movie, to be sure, but so timid and clumsy in its deployment of picture, sound, and editing that you have to wonder if executive producer Martin Scorsese bothered to give notes.
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Lonergan's validation of big-minded small-town life has been neatened up to the point of blandness.