No film has captured how we idealize others in relationships better than Two Lovers.

| Original Score: 9.5/10 | Mar 20, 2024

Gray gives us nothing to cling to emotionally, and so he leaves the audience floating in the indifference of open space, hoping for something worthwhile to happen that might make us care.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 15, 2023

Episode 49: Hustlers / Ad Astra / Two Lovers / ALTIPLANO

| Original Score: 78/100 | Oct 18, 2021

What's striking about this particular entry in the Phoenix-as-isolated-eccentric canon is its flavour of defeated animal loneliness.

| Feb 3, 2021

Gray has made a thoughtful and sensitive chamber piece, and he gets a fine performance from Phoenix, who conveys his character's anguish and heartache with deep feeling.

| Nov 24, 2020

It features a solid performance by Joaquin Phoenix, but the truth is that its story about the stages of heartbreak and toxic relationships is predictable and somewhat conventional. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 8, 2020

Joaquin Phoenix stars-and delivers his most self-scourging performance-in James Gray's taut and melancholy Brighton Beach romance.

| Apr 14, 2020

But the true beauty of Two Lovers is the tightly constructed plot and accurately conceived emotions of this engaging ensemble piece.

| Jan 27, 2020

The whole film feels like a throwback, at once swooningly romantic and achingly sad.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 7, 2019

Everything about this quietly beautiful film is understated - the performances, the score and, most of all, the inner turmoil that easily can mean life or death for the most sensitive among us.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 11, 2018

James Gray has exactly what American cinema needs-sincerity. Gray deals in melodrama-and male melodrama at that-but treats it with a solemn seriousness that makes one believe again in the earnestness of American genre cinema.

| Nov 16, 2017

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

What made the filmmakers come up with such a 1959 scenario? Better yet, how did they make this hoary plot so damned entertaining? Must be movie magic.

| Aug 16, 2011

| Original Score: A | May 6, 2011

Please, don't be fooled by this. It's all showboating scenes, pretentious ideals and NO realism whatsoever.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 13, 2011

I can't stop thinking about Leonard, how I want him to be free, living an authentic life ... but also to to remain under supervision so he won't mess himself up. Phoenix is brilliant here.

| Original Score: 7.5/10 | May 7, 2010

We know the characters better than they know themselves

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 13, 2010

Tells a pretty old story but gets you hooked on its atmosphere and how it embellishes the heady sensation of shedding the coldness of solitude and depression with the warmth of walking through a new romance.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 25, 2010

Sure, Phoenix's current foray to hip-hop is uncomfortably bizarre to behold, but at least it's not as painfully boring and predictable as what he claims is his last film.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 22, 2010

Lugubrious affair involving a young man suffering from weltschmerz and the two women he loves set in Brighton Beach.

| Nov 13, 2009