Blue Valentine Reviews
Top CriticBlue Valentine has a rare emotional intensity. There is no way to prepare for its final frames, inevitable as they are.
A searing portrait of the disintegration of not just a marriage but, more importantly, the love that once fueled it.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
An autopsy of a failed marriage, it contrasts the giddy honeymoon beginning with the sad denouement after dysfunction has devastated the groundwork of hope and newness.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Blue Valentine comes on like a bittersweet cautionary tale.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's not an easy movie, but it is a powerful, unforgettable experience.
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| Original Score: A
Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling tear up the screen.
Bright-eyed youth and bedraggled adulthood alternate in a sad spectacle beautifully and sensitively portrayed.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
You are witnessing the implosion of a marriage, and it's a sad, discomfiting thing to behold.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Almost unbearably harrowing but also deeply cathartic, as viewers create their own meanings within Dean and Cindy's singular downward spiral.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The best of it plays like an acting exercise that serves the intimate, often bruising relationship at the core. Gosling seems to be pulling from an impressive bag of performance tricks, Williams from a deeper well, drawn from life.
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| Original Score: 3/4
What do we expect of a spouse? "Blue Valentine" makes us ask that question.
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| Original Score: 4/4
"Blue Valentine" has a palpable air of claustrophobic danger; you constantly expect something terrible to be happening to these characters. And, indeed, something does.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
As the film, which Derek Cianfrance directed and co-wrote, makes its way to the end of its second hour, it becomes an acutely stylized, slow-motion marital accident. You either want to call AAA or roll your eyes.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The film proceeds in what feels like real time, but with no obvious beginning or end. It's a latticework of moments happy and sad.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Derek Cianfrance, the film's writer and director, observes with great exactitude the birth and decay of a relationship. This film is alive in its details.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This is a marvel of a movie, but in the interest of perpetuating the human race, I'd counsel dewy young couples embarking on life's journey to check into a sex motel instead.
The film's time structure is splintered into shards of past and present, which is probably just as well -- a strictly narrative chronology would make this wallow seem even sloggier.
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| Original Score: C
Flashes of brilliance, but the lead performances were mannered and the script overwritten. Too self-consciously indie-hipster.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
... when you break it down, [it] largely feels genuinely honest, rather than aspiring to an obvious movie facsimile of "honest."
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Blue Valentine wrenches us with its painful and tender understanding of how people with even this tattered a connection can lunge for love as if it were air.
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| Original Score: A
A small but shattering film that marks its writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, as an artist of real depth.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Cianfrance's film is frustratingly surface-bound in ways that reflect, if not out-and-out misogyny, then at least a lack of interest in imbuing his female character with the rich interior life and complicated morality he gives his male lead.
A work so beautifully acted and emotionally honest it is my choice for best movie of the year.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Blue Valentine feels off-the-cuff and improvised, which adds to the charm of that first date and the danger of that "big fight."
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| Original Score: 3/4
An intensely intimate rendering of love that limits itself to that first falling in and that last falling out.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Gosling and Williams have the most palpable chemistry of any screen couple this year, never striking a false note in this achingly tender tale of a love that implodes before our eyes.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Blue Valentine sets past and present on course for a collision, and measures the full weight of its impact.
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams give two of the most explosive and emotionally naked performances you will see anywhere.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Ms. Williams and Mr. Gosling are exemplars of New Method sincerity, able to be fully and achingly present every moment on screen together.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Nothing out of the ordinary happens in Blue Valentine, and that, together with the vital, untrammelled performances of the two leading actors, is the root of its power.
Agonizing to watch yet relentlessly compelling.
Blue Valentine leaves you with the shattering vision of its truest victim -- the one who'll someday look for safety in places it might not be. And the psychodrama will go on and on ...
Movie intimacy reaches groundbreaking new heights in this shocking story of a young marriage on the rocks.
If you care about the integrity of independent cinema, you'll steel your heart and go.
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| Original Score: 5/5
The scenes cut so close to the emotional bone that you can understand why they might cause a panic amongst MPAA boardmembers, although of course, it's nothing to be afraid of: just the realism of love in its varied forms.
Ultimately too painful, too labored, to care much about at all.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The ghost of John Cassavetes hovers over this tough-minded portrait of a working-class couple's marriage.
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| Original Score: 3/4
An intensely acted, minutely observed attempt to convey the arc of a romantic involvement.
Penetrating but tedious close-up of a marriage breakup.
