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Critics Consensus: It has the schmaltzy trappings of my romantic films, but Like Crazy allows its characters to express themselves beyond dialogue, crafting a true, intimate study.
Critic Consensus: It has the schmaltzy trappings of my romantic films, but Like Crazy allows its characters to express themselves beyond dialogue, crafting a true, intimate study.
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All Critics (150) | Top Critics (43) | Fresh (108) | Rotten (42) | DVD (3)
The couple's story is related through small, true-to-life details that paint an unidealized portrait of love - the euphoria, the sadness, and everything in between.
It's imperative for director and co-writer Drake Doremus to color the film with a great deal of blossoming-love sparkle right off the bat, and he does just that.
Doremus delivers a tightly focused film that's all the more impressive for being improvised.
It's not exactly Casablanca, but times have changed.
While the film is often quite moving, it's also at times frustrating; people in love, we realize, aren't always as fascinating to the rest of us as they are to each other.
What could have come off as stilted and artificial is instead genuine and natural.
A regrettable one night stand, I could see, but they dive unhesitatingly into serious monogamous relationships with other people during their separation. That's not the true love I remember.
Not without faults, but it's through sheer tenacity, candor and the air of authenticity Doremus, Jones and Yelchin are able to establish that it can differentiate itself from other films of its ilk.
Writer/director Drake Doremus... pulls very good performances from a young cast...
I hated, hated, hated these people and despise writer-director Drake Doremous for wasting a brutally overlong 89 minutes of my life with them.
...an uneven endeavor from a promising new filmmaker...
I'll admit that my heart broke a little by film's end, as the camera rested on Yelchin and Jones's faraway looks and Stars' sublime "Dead Hearts" flooded the soundtrack.
The leads are very talented even if not so charismatic (and they don't have a lot of chemistry together), but this is compensated by a mature story told with a lot of conviction and made even more sincere by its dynamic editing that shows well the power of time in a relationship.
Super Reviewer
Wanted to like this, but it just felt like a real nothing movie. I didn't buy the attraction between the pair, which I guess is a major problem for this genre. I didn't really care if they got together or not. To me, they were both cheaters anyhow, so can't have been too madly in love.
I just don't see how anyone really enjoys watching two inconsiderate people hate each other for decades while calling it love. Recently there has been this trend of love stories about people doomed to repeat stupid decisions over and over again, never ending up with the person they are meant to be with. These films are oftentimes badly thought out and have super melodramatic stories that center on immature, useless individuals with little to no characteristics except their own selfishness and inability to commit. This story isn't as longwinded as "One Day" or as large as life as say "The English Patient" but it falls under this umbrella because of the length of their courtship and their eventual decline. Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin have zero to no chemistry in this, their characters are inane, their acting is over the top, and we jump through time with no explanation, at various points in the story, skewing what's happening on screen. The fact that Jennifer Lawrence shows up in a quick couple scenes is the only thing interesting about this, otherwise this is a clear snooze fest.
It drags at times, but ultimately the film avoids romance-movie clichés with its excellent acting and interesting plot. The pacing is mostly done well, and I enjoyed the cinematography and the film editing. It's not an entirely memorable film, but it charms despite its obvious flaws.
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