Celeste and Jesse Forever Reviews
Top Critic
This potentially aggravating comedy remains sweet, smart and very enjoyable.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The give and take here feels completely real, and each character is likable while also flawed and vulnerable.
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| Original Score: B+
A different kind of romantic comedy: one that starts at the end and tries to make sense of itself.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Tries to blend chick flick staples with bro humor but never quite gets the mix right.
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| Original Score: 1/4
It's supposed to exemplify witty, edgy, indie comedy. But "Celeste and Jesse Forever" turns out to be a formula movie ...
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| Original Score: 2/4
Jones and co-star Andy Samberg are an agreeable pair, but nothing about Celeste or Jesse would make you want to spend an evening with them, much less eternity.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The movie feels lived in by its characters and its makers, which is more than you can say for most romantic comedies, indie or otherwise.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Yes, the characters are impossibly beautiful and hip, but beyond that, they seem real.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The tone established by director Lee Toland Krieger is flippant when it needs to be, ironic when it needs to be, playful when it needs to be, and serious when it needs to be.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This is a "personal" movie in a typically impersonal genre. And it gets at the way women, newly arrived on the dating scene and all their defenses down, can be stupefied by men.
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| Original Score: B+
Yet one more of a series of summer films in which attractive, ambitious young women are punished for not accepting the man-children in their lives despite their torn-teddy-bear flaws.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Both old-fashioned and modern, both funny and melancholic, the witty, heartfelt "Celeste and Jesse Forever" is populated by moments that at first appear all too familiar, then turn out to surprise you.
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| Original Score: 4/4
This romantic comedy is ambitious and thoughtful, asking us to consider what makes a really good marriage, yet it's based on a sort of narrative sleight of hand.
Underneath it is an honest concern about how to learn to treat people well and kindly after the end. Or to get to an ending, or a new beginning, in the first place.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A good-hearted romantic comedy about a likable couple - so likable, indeed, that it swims upstream against the current of our desires.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Jones and McCormack have a nice feel for the day-to-day minutiae of coupledom - the inside jokes, funny voices and oddball routines that nobody else ever understands, and that hurt like hell to abandon.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
As director Lee Toland Krieger desperately attempts to keep this film on a comic track, his actors' script awkwardly escapes him, insisting on its indie spirit in the last act.
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| Original Score: 1/4
It may have the faintest relationship to any kind of reality, but Jones' tart performance cuts through the saccharine.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The summer's most unpredictable, low-key and clear-sighted romantic comedy.
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| Original Score: 3/4
More often than not "Celeste and Jesse Forever" delivers an affectionate and intelligent look at how even the closest couples can find that breaking up is so very hard to do.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
It's a shame that Celeste & Jesse plummets into conventionality in its second half, because it starts out so promisingly.
The more these two likable people rattled on, the more I found myself thinking about the elusive distinction between characters talking genuinely smart talk and simply chattering for the camera.
While "Celeste and Jesse" is decidedly conventional in most respects, it's pretty swell as an exploration of a relationship between a man and a woman that's no longer predicated by mutual desire.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Maybe Celeste and Jesse Forever sometimes works too hard at being funny-sad. Still, it's admirable in its pursuit of an unnamable beast that's elusive and fragile: The funny sadness of the whole damn thing.
Jones co-wrote the uneven script with Will McCormack, and one can't help wishing she'd aimed higher. Acknowledging cineplex clichés isn't enough if you still wind up embracing, rather than subverting, them.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Celeste and Jesse Forever rises above the rom-com herd with breakout star performances from Jones and Samberg and a willingness to replace clichés with painful truths.
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| Original Score: 3/4
I'd rather watch five divorce movies like this than one more featuring Katherine Heigl getting married.
The movie keeps taking us, like its characters, by surprise.
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| Original Score: A-
...if Celeste and Jesse Forever is a showcase for anyone -- and it is -- you'd first have to note Jones and Samberg.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
A film that starts with a breakup and moves toward, well, no resolution that's traditionally satisfying, is a film that truly understands the sublime and painful comedy of having been in love.
"Celeste and Jesse Forever" is by no means a parody of romantic comedy cliches, but rather an acknowledgement of them en route to an exploration of greater emotional truths.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A very simple romantic comedy, coasting along on its likable leads' chemistry through their bittersweet breakup.
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| Original Score: 3/5
A notably lo-fi entry into the recent trend of romantic comedies that think acknowledging the genre's clichés is as good as subverting them.
Celeste & Jesse Forever earns points for bucking formula, but its fusion of snark and sincerity has a calculated slickness that rings increasingly hollow.
Borrows tropes from the rom-com playbook, and has enough laughs to be mistaken for one, but ultimately doesn't want to be pigeonholed.
