Memory is a remarkably humane film that avoids any obvious missteps that would see it collapse into movie-of-the-week social issue melodrama terrain

| Jun 18, 2024

Chastain and Sarsgaard are a class act — their touching, tactile chemistry is the film’s triumph.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2024

Insinuating and bravely acted, Memory is plotted like a play: there are shades of Florian Zeller’s The Father, albeit with the dementia theme as only one side of the coin here.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 29, 2024

There’s lots of shouting and crying, Chastain and Sarsgaard are eminently watchable, as they always are and the ending is cute, but it also defies logic and any semblance of credibility.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 28, 2024

Franco is kinder to these characters than he has been to many of his creations, leaving the viewer to parse the moral murk.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 24, 2024

Memory would be too contrived a work to buy into if it weren’t for the talents of Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 23, 2024

Franco radically turns the rudder to dive us into a story about an impossible love with unpredictable consequences, supported by stupendous performances by Chastain and Sarsgaard. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jan 30, 2024

It is amazing how two stars can sustain the most rickety of productions – especially when those performers typically approach acting from opposite ends when it comes to style, tenor and presence.

| Jan 18, 2024

So much of the heart of this movie is in [Brooke Timber's] reactions to this very strange romance.

| Jan 6, 2024

This is a film in which characters make questionable and sometimes troubling choices right up until the final scene, and yet we understand why they do the things they do, and we root fiercely for things to work between them.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 5, 2024

Fueled by terrific performances from Chastain and Sarsgaard, this impossible love story between a woman who can't forget and man who can't remember slowly works its way into your mind and heart. Director Michel Franco makes sure you’ll be moved to tears.

| Jan 5, 2024

As anguished, tender and soulful as the film is, Mr. Franco keeps it from feeling soapy by approaching it with a kitchen-sink frankness not far removed from documentary.

| Jan 5, 2024

Though it is not easily categorizable, Memory is a thoughtful journey featuring very fine performances from both Chastain and Sarsgaard.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 4, 2024

The relationship doesn’t cohere dramatically, alas, despite the demonstrative tenderness and commitment that the actors bring to it, and the story’s multiple gaps in logic don’t help.

| Jan 4, 2024

Franco has the ability to compel an audience’s attention simply by focusing on an actor who is actively thinking, but his strategy depends on casting. He needs the right actors, and in “Memory” he gets two of them.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 4, 2024

It’s a movie that understands fully how nothing about our lives is a given, and that if you look hard enough at yours, there’s always something worth escaping from and running toward.

| Dec 22, 2023

Franco’s film unfurls with measured curiosity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 22, 2023

The film reveals itself as a prototypical yet surprisingly tender love story between two damaged people re-learning how to move through a world that’s unable to adequately support them.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 12, 2023

This is an absorbing story, acted with superlative delicacy and maturity by Chastain and Sarsgaard.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 6, 2023

Chastain and Sarsgaard rise to the challenge of these complex roles. In particular, Sarsgaard finds truth in a gentle man who is constantly forced to reassess his situation and relationship with the people around him.

| Sep 21, 2023