The music is arranged by Jonathan Goldsmith and it's fantastic. Along with the fun camera work by Sarah, the music adds a nice touch to the film making the stories even more heartbreaking and compelling. It's good stuff.

| Original Score: A- | Aug 15, 2024

Surprisingly confessional and deeply compelling... The result is a story of great sadness, great joy and great entertainment.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 9, 2021

Unfortunately, Stories We Tell lacks the historical sense, in keeping with most contemporary movies, that could have made it far more compelling.

| Feb 27, 2021

Sorting through those secrets through Polley's candid interviews with her father, family members, and close family friends is fascinating to watch.

| Jan 15, 2021

The pay-off that Polley leads us to is real enough to hang a movie on.

| Feb 28, 2020

...Polley explores her experience with great insight in an unusual film that includes astonishingly convincing Super-8 "home movies" ...

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 31, 2019

The work of a professional director... that can guide the viewer's emotions and attention. [Full review in Spanish]

| Dec 6, 2019

Stories We Tell ditches the burger and fries and delivers nothing but vegetables.

| Original Score: C+ | Aug 27, 2019

Boldly putting her entire family on camera, Sarah Polley unwraps the riddle of her parentage with exquisite craft. Deconstructing as she goes, she turns the home movie, real and faux, into new genre of investigative memoir.

| Jul 31, 2019

It's thrilling, with emotional highs and lows that are intensified by the fact that we're watching real people-a real family-have their world shaken and turned upside-down.

| Original Score: 8.8/10 | Apr 15, 2019

Fiercely unsentimental, never nostalgic, [Sarah] Polley's version of the story is simultaneously always trying to get that much closer to the truth.

| Feb 26, 2019

Stories We Tell is clearly a form of creative catharsis for Polley. Yet through its clarity and sincerity her documentary gathers greater meaning, transcending its humble origins and effortlessly enrapturing the audience with its bittersweet tale.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 26, 2019

A finely-crafted and incredibly moving work.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 2, 2019

Sarah Polley's funny and engaging documentary is also intelligent - academically and emotionally.

| Jan 30, 2019

A quasi-Derridan, deconstructionist enquiry by Sarah Polley into her family history.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 16, 2018

Stories We Tell" unmistakably originates from a singular vision, but also serves as a testament to what happens when individual perspectives blend into one, creating something far greater than the sum of its parts - in this case, a truly special film.

| Dec 4, 2018

Stories We Tell takes a long, long time to get moving. But once it does, it doesn't stop.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 21, 2018

Immensely thought-provoking and reflective, Polley delivers an enticing documentary about the theme of obligatory dark family secrets and turns her unassuming project into an intimate and compelling jigsaw puzzle

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 12, 2018

Polley proves expert at holding back key information, revealing it at a point where she can most effectively recreate her own emotional journey into what she belatedly realised were mysterious circumstances surrounding her childhood.

| Jan 3, 2018

This is the most functional tale of dysfunctional-family drama I've ever heard.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 25, 2017