| Universal Pictures | Release Date: November 13, 2015 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
9
Mixed:
15
Negative:
11
|
Watch Now
Critic Reviews
Jolie Pitt, in her third film as a director, infuses her original screenplay with a sparseness reminiscent of Hemingway’s tales of mislaid love and Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinematic alienation. But By the Sea is its own lovely creation, deadly serious about how grief divides, conquers and possibly unites.
Read full review
It sounds far sexier, just based on the synopsis, than it actually plays, though, so hopefully people aren't sold the wrong movie. For those in the mood for a throwback to the doomed romanticism of mid'60s art films, this feels like about as sincere an homage as anyone could produce.
Read full review
It’s a romantic, erotic drama that’s told with an unusual blend of rapture and coldness, of overwhelming yearning and clinical detachment — and, above all, the movie has images that go far beyond the recording of performances and the framing of action in order to make a melancholy and mysterious visual music.
Read full review
At first luxurious blush it’s a jet-setting marital melodrama, one of those he-said, she-said (and wept) encounter sessions decked with designer shades, to-die-for digs and millionaire tears. More interestingly, the movie, which Ms. Jolie Pitt wrote and directed, is a knowing or at least a ticklishly amusing demonstration of celebrity and its relay of gazes from one of the most looked-at women in the world.
Read full review
Jolie and Pitt are both, without a doubt, very good actors, and in the film’s rare moments of vulnerability, their fights and reconciliations contain a seed of devastating emotional truth that speaks to the pair’s talent and real-life bond. But those moments are suffocated under long, dreadfully dull sequences where everyone poses artfully and says very little.
Read full review
The result is something like a weepy Lifetime melodrama told in the languorous, self-indulgent style of European art cinema, as if Michelangelo Antonioni or Bernardo Bertolucci had wound up in debt to multiple ex-wives and were forced to churn out straight-to-cable movies, circa 1986.
Read full review
Jolie Pitt is going for a European cinema vibe here, but all the smoking, drinking and speaking in French can’t disguise the fact that there isn’t a lot going on here. Filmmakers reserve every right to demand patience from their audiences, but they have to provide a worthwhile payoff in the end. By the Sea simply doesn’t.
Read full review
RogerEbert.comNov 13, 2015
Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score





























