Laurence Anyways Reviews
Lushly romantic and daringly original.
It's all too much, really, including its 21/2-hour-plus running time. But it's also engrossing, an ultimately tender story of a transsexual's transformation over 10 years and its effect on him and the people around him.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Los Angeles Times
Top CriticAt nearly three hours, it's by turns an extraordinary and exhausting work.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Poupaud's quiet moments convey a lofty, poignant introspection, and Clément erupts with grand, if scattershot, furies.
At nearly three hours, it's entirely too long, needlessly padded out with an intrusive interview-framing device.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
[Mr. Dolan] perfectly evokes the violating effect of a stranger's scrutiny and the imponderable depths of a lover's gaze.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
For all of its transgender drama, "Laurence Anyways" remains a love story, pure but not so simple.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Without belittling the challenges and prejudices Laurence faces, Dolan places her story into larger contexts, posing questions about conformity, heartbreak, love and self-fulfillment.
Forgive this film its marvelous moodiness-someone needs to go there once in a while.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Both deeply refreshing and important.
Fully immodest and intermittently astonishing.
[It] zeroes in on the impact of transgender on a relationship, and tries to understand what makes two people stay together or fall apart.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A well-acted drama about two anguished lovers struggling with their own flaws and an unjust society.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The story just doesn't have the heft that its 161-minute running time implies. It's about an hour longer than the story requires, even for one that spans decades.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
If anything, it's a bold manifesto aimed at critics like me who have slagged the filmmaker off as all style and no substance.
A sumptuously orchestrated love story about a transsexual man's decade-long struggle to maintain a passionate romance with his female soulmate in the face of creeping hostility from friends, family and society.
