It's OK, I suppose, and quite sweet. But I couldn't love it for proper, probably because its characters are always more interested in themselves than we are in them, plus it's just too self-consciously tricksy.

| Aug 31, 2018

... at its core, Beginners is about finding happiness, even at the end.

| Original Score: A | Sep 8, 2017

Mike Mills treats love and loss with a disarming tenderness and a refusal of sentimentality that make Beginners, his second feature, something of an anomaly among male identity flicks. What a finely wrought, wryly funny, transcendently sad movie this is.

| Jul 12, 2013

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 18, 2012

A quietly moving, delicately mounted romantic drama that touches the heart with resorting to melodrama or an over-reliance on conflict.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 18, 2011

Beginners is perceptive, funny and moving.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 25, 2011

One can only regret this writer-director's decision to cram so much material into the mix that some fine understated performances, and much of the film's emotional impact, are obscured along the way.

| Jul 26, 2011

It's one of those movies I can't be sure you'll be tempted by, but I'm certain that if you are, you'll like it very much.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 22, 2011

McGregor, in one of his most assured performances, helps anchor a film that could have seemed very fey and far-fetched indeed. He underplays beautifully.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 22, 2011

An oddly charming concoction.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 21, 2011

It is tonally elusive, cerebral and subdued, but this is a film with a healthy, if self-conscious IQ. It could be an excellent date movie.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 21, 2011

Beginners drones along in a state of melancholic navel-gazing.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 21, 2011

With good performances and characters, Beginners is an enjoyable, amusing and occasionally poignant watch.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 18, 2011

Beginners pays tender tribute to that imprinting process, but also, quite dazzlingly, makes a person sincerely believe in the possibility of rebirth.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 24, 2011

A strange and beautiful film.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 24, 2011

"Beginners" is a delightful film - gentle, playful, creative and ultimately happy - though it's a tricky journey.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 23, 2011

Excruciatingly faux-naïve and sentimental...

| Jun 20, 2011

Wwhile there's plenty of melancholia, there is also sweet wonder and celebration in writer-director Mike Mills' semiautobiographical tale of a straight son coming to terms with his own love's possibilities after his father comes out of the closet.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 17, 2011

In his follow-up to Thumbsucker, writer-director Mike Mills continues to evoke a state of perpetual adolescence: the only fears given real weight are of not being liked and of having to behave like a responsible adult.

| Jun 17, 2011

Beginners finds life both ripe with possibility and ensnared in the past. But then every morning is a beginning, right? If only we could remember that.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 17, 2011