The Place Beyond The Pines Reviews
This naturalistic drama is ambitious to the point of being unwieldy... But once the story has advanced from one generation to the next and its thematic sweep has become apparent, these flaws seem much more tolerable.
"Pines" is hardy stuff, but it's at its toughest when Gosling's on screen.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
The Place Beyond the Pines is hackneyed and dull: Not a single moment rings true.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
This is a story about legacy, the sins of the father, the restlessness in our souls. It's powerful, it's bold, it hits you hard.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Cianfrance and his sterling cast keep it all together, vanquishing doubt and soap suds. There's a palpable sense of teamwork that brings out the best in all of these players.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Its three stories are so loosely connected, its themes so scattered -- morality, justice, fate, fatherhood -- that it never manages to make a point.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Carefully observed and consistently compelling, it feels like an instant American classic, if a minor one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
With the arrival of The Place Beyond the Pines, the American dramatic film has found a loyal, gifted advocate in director Derek Cianfrance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
As the sum of some admittedly imperfect parts, "The Place Beyond the Pines" still manages to cast its own haunting, sorrowful spell.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
With more than 50 speaking roles, the film easily could have sprawled out of control into a predictable epic. But "The Place Beyond the Pines" holds enough intimacy - and surprise - to satisfy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Cianfrance hasn't figured out what he wants to say, but he spends a lot of time and energy trying to say it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Fine, fine, it's an epic. Now let us up for air, please.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
You watch what happens, often dreading the worst. Even when the worst comes, though, it comes with honor and a kind of grace.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
"The Place Beyond the Pines" earns every second of its 140-minute running time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
If there are better films this year, then we are in luck. If it opened in December it would seem a major event.
The movie is intimate in its telling, sweeping in its issues and stumbles only occasionally.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Its ambitions - even its unrealized ones - are a great part of its power.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Structured as a triptych, the movie is novelistic, earnest and somewhat exhausting - an ambitious effort that tries to be many things.
Each chapter of The Place Beyond the Pines gets successively less interesting than the last ...
For the most part ... this is self-serious stuff, seething with ambition but almost devoid of spontaneity, and ultimately drained of genuine energy.
If, in the end, the film can't quite sustain its epic vision, it does, along the way, achieve the density and momentum of a good novel.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
It's one of the best and most ambitious films of the year.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
[The Place Beyond The Pines] a beast of a movie, an emotional roller coaster that threatens to go off the rails, and does.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This is a big movie with a lot on its mind. Slowly, it unfolds into a kind of epic.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The movie, which holds your attention from moment to moment, by the end leaves you grasping for the experience you haven't had.
This emotionally ambitious mess has faults to spare, but there's also something fuzzily honest about it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Although The Place Beyond the Pines is not an unqualified success, when Cianfrance stumbles, it's because he's reaching for greatness ...
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| Original Score: 3/4
An over-stuffed, hyper-pulpy, and mostly trite trifurcated drama about family, crime, and moral ambiguity.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
The Place Beyond the Pines wants to be a deep-dish meditation on fathers, sons, and the consequences of the decisions we make. But it's a slow-burner that burns so slowly its wick completely fizzles out.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Mr. Cianfrance's artistic vision catapults it above the limitations of contrivance and into a realm of constantly evolving shifts of tone and mood.
''The Place Beyond the Pines'' aims admirably for an epic sense of Greek tragedy, and it does have some powerful individual moments, but the characters are all so underdeveloped that the whole effort feels like studied posturing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The movie looks great throughout, blending action, urban drama and family melodrama with a dark, thrumming undertone that holds them together.
Sure to inspire indifference and cultish admiration in nearly equal measure, this extravagant mess may someday be re-evaluated as a misunderstood masterpiece.
We're too close to Drive to see this performance as anything special, but when Suicide's "Che" churns to life on the soundtrack and Gosling peels out, there are thrills to be had.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
A somber and striking drama that takes some wrong turns but features a charismatic performance from Ryan Gosling in the leanest and best of its three sections.
The segments are essentially monodramas, so sketchily written that the big moments feel less like recognizable human behavior than recognizable screenwriter overreaching.
Globe and Mail
Top CriticA sweeping, bold and admirably ambitious crime movie triptych, which almost compensates for its occasional overreaching with sheer bravado and fully committed performances.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There is true beauty in the despair that pervades "The Place Beyond The Pines."
Full Review
| Original Score: B
