The Place Beyond The Pines Reviews

While it is still a rewarding film on face value, The Place Beyond the Pines offers additional pleasures for viewers keen to delve further.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

...the best kind of film: big enough to be bracing, but small enough to draw you right in, and then exercise a firm, vice-like grip.

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It's the interesting characters and their thought-provoking choices that make this film so compelling.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

An ambitious and twisting crime drama about fathers, sons and responsibility.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

Cianfrance creates a layered and moving portrait of working-class life, of people trying-- in many of the wrong ways-- to improve lives for themselves and the generations to come.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

This ambitious tale of tragedy and redemption among fathers and sons is told in three parts and, despite a superb performance from Ryan Gosling, is less than the sum of its parts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

Gosling delivers his most assured performance yet, in an ambitious, near-operatic drama-thriller that boldly unfolds across two distinctly different hours.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

With the final act, as we see the longer term impact of earlier actions, the film attains something akin to epic status, stirring notions of classic Greek tragedy before scaling back and completing itself as a contemporary morality tale

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Mike Patton's grumbling song The Weight of Consequences eloquently reflects the hard-hitting theme of this provocative and gripping film in which three troubled roads are travelled

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Cianfrance handles these large leaps in time with grace; he doesn't seem to leave anything out. His camera lingers generously over small moments so that no character gets lost in time.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

The Place Beyond the Pines is a deeply affecting family drama about paternal responsibility, a riveting crime story, a cop movie and a tragedy.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

A film of two distinct halves and it works to provide a dual character study of paternity and legacy

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

The most satisfying cinematic experience we've had at the multiplex thus far this year, and largely through its disinterest in playing along with movie trends.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Not since Steve McQueen has any man looked cooler on a motorbike. Men admire him, women adore him, Ryan Gosling proves again, he is the most dynamic film star working in cinema today.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10

Great cast but the script meanders and ends up nowhere.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10

It allows you to really observe its characters and to ponder the themes that fuel the plot. For that reason, it is a film that makes a deeply emotional impact.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

The mythically tinged final scene brings events full circle in a way that is superficially satisfying while also conceding that the movie's chief concern is men and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

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"It's up to the actors to figure this out, and they try...but The Place Beyond the Pines displays a strange paternalistic streak."

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5

Dove into deep psychological turf but without coming up with significant insights.

Full Review | Original Score: B

By the time director and co-writer Derek Cianfrance gets to the third act, it's a soap opera and not a very good one.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5