Take This Waltz is a Remarkable, Offbeat Love Story

| Aug 29, 2013

Polley is a subtle filmmaker, and a surprising one, too.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2012

Committed and resonant, Take This Waltz gets under your skin - and feels a lot like the work of an auteur in the making.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 16, 2012

Basically pretty humourless, considering that sharp comics Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman are in the cast, clearly doing their level best as actors. But there's no air for them to breathe.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 16, 2012

Polley delivers a rich evocation of the central marriage, with its mixture of by-rote ritual and easy comfort, and makes the wise and unusual decision to portray the cuckold-to-be (Seth Rogen) as decent and good-natured, rather than stiff or cruel.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 16, 2012

Flush with beauty and truth, and is unerringly, unnervingly accurate on love, desire and friendship.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 16, 2012

A hard-headed, generous film about love.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 14, 2012

A masterfully painted portrait of an ordinary marriage under threat, dominated by a central performance of exquisite subtlety and observation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2012

Polley (who's been an actress herself) never judges these people she's created. Instead, she depicts the giddy, fleeting and illusory nature of new love, and lets us get caught up in it, too.

Full Review | Jul 16, 2012

No one's a cliche; no one speaks dialogue the viewer could have muttered a beat or two ahead of the movie; no one hews to a mode of behavior fabricated to explain away his or her irrational behavior.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 13, 2012

[It] often feels thin and self-conscious.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 12, 2012

Williams lives and breathes her role, Kirby is charming and real, and you actually start to ache and empathize with Rogen - the emptiness and heartache he conveys when Lou and Margot finally thrash things out is crushing.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 12, 2012

Both the small moments and the end product of Waltz are quietly sublime.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 12, 2012

If uncompromising honesty is the quality you seek for a film, Michelle Williams is your go-to star.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 12, 2012

A film with extreme situations that never register on a personal level because they feel more like arthouse cinema exercises than truth.

| Original Score: 3.0/5.0 | Jul 12, 2012

Polley wonders the same thing in nearly every scene, no matter who's in it. Is a comfortable marriage really marriage enough?

| Jul 12, 2012

I have great admiration for [Williams] as an actress, but this story might have been better told with a less lovable star.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 12, 2012

Margot comes across as such an elusive and unsympathetic twit that you wonder why we should care about her.

| Original Score: C+ | Jul 6, 2012

In the end, it's a story of misplaced faith. In what? Not love exactly, but in the rush of infatuation, and the illusion that this feeling can be maintained, indefinitely, without crashing.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 6, 2012

At its worst, Polley's style veers toward the cornball. Yet, in the broad outlines of her story, she has clearly created something with a lot of hard truth.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 5, 2012