Manchester by the Sea
Roadside Attractions | Release Date: November 18, 2016 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
96
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 53 Critic Reviews
Positive:
52
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
EmpirePhil de SemlyenJan 9, 2017
Masterfully told and beautifully acted, Manchester By The Sea is a shattering yet graceful elegy of loss and grief. Read full review
100
Total FilmJamie GrahamJan 9, 2017
If ever there was a film that epitomised the saying ‘no pain, no gain’, this is it. Packs a real wallop. Read full review
100
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottDec 7, 2016
Opening a window into a wounded soul, it reminds us that beneath even the most brusque, hard-to-approach exterior often lies a human being bearing the scars of real, sometimes devastating human experiences. Also like "Moonlight," it is one of the best films of 2016, and one not to be missed. Read full review
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallDec 7, 2016
Manchester by the Sea is a gracefully coarse ode to lives knocked down and if not bouncing back at least not splatting at rock bottom. There are also glimmers of humor shining all the brighter because of the darkness they cut through. Read full review
100
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldDec 1, 2016
Every Manchester scene gives you a sense of the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, where it’s bitter cold but nobody makes too much of it, where the past stays with you whether you want it to or not. This is a movie that pays careful attention to details. Read full review
100
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonDec 1, 2016
With Manchester by the Sea writer-director Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) confirms his status as a major American filmmaker. Read full review
100
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezDec 1, 2016
But this is also his funniest, nimblest picture: There are long stretches in it that could pass for a comedy. Read full review
100
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenNov 30, 2016
The peerless actors match and elevate Lonergan’s artistry beat for beat. And the film’s greatest gift of all may be that it declines to tidy up after itself, prettifying life’s messiness with a finishing bow. In the end, it’s the package that counts, not the wrapping. Read full review
100
ConsequenceMichael RoffmanNov 30, 2016
This is pitch-perfect filmmaking, the kind that turns a hungry visionary into a popular last name. Rest assured, it’s all earned. Manchester by the Sea is a hearty, rewarding drama audiences will remember for years. Read full review
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorNov 30, 2016
One of the things that is admirable about Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea – and there are many admirable things about this quietly moving drama – is the way its initial enigma seems to need no explanation; yet, once deciphered, the film does not falter but moves only deeper into the emotional territory it charts. Read full review
100
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzNov 24, 2016
Manchester by the Sea is a masterpiece in a minor key, an exploration of grief that never lets its characters — or its audience — off the hook. It manages this even when it’s funny, which is surprisingly often. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsNov 24, 2016
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperNov 24, 2016
This is one of the funniest films about coping with tragedy I’ve ever seen. Not that it’s a comedy, not for a second. It’s an immensely moving and beautifully resonant drama about the walking wounded and how they cope with a horrific event from many years past. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy BurrNov 22, 2016
Manchester by the Sea is an experience worth having, not for the magnificence of its impact or the far-flung grandeur of its settings but for the way it illuminates with quiet, unyielding grace how you and I and our neighbors get by, and sometimes how we don’t. Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayNov 22, 2016
Manchester by the Sea is a film of surpassing beauty and heart. Even at its most melancholy depths, it brims with candid, earnest, indefatigable life. Read full review
100
SlateDana StevensNov 22, 2016
Each character in this movie — down to the smallest cameo by Lonergan himself — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzNov 18, 2016
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time. Read full review
100
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerNov 18, 2016
A movie about unremitting grief and yet it has a boisterousness, a comic twirl, that makes it much truer to the zigzags of life than most similarly themed movies that simply pile on the gloom. Read full review
100
New York PostKyle SmithNov 17, 2016
Affleck eschews all the actors’ clichés — burning intensity, soulful suffering, haunted brooding. It’s a magnificently interior performance, the sort of acting that doesn’t call attention to itself but draws us in to peer closer. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternNov 17, 2016
See this film as soon as you can, preferably with someone you love. Kenneth Lonergan’s third feature as a writer-director is a drama of surpassing beauty, and Casey Affleck’s portrayal of the janitor, Lee Chandler, is stripped-back perfection — understated, unaffected, yet stunning in depth and resonance. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyNov 17, 2016
Affleck has never had a role that matches his minimal, anti-charisma style like this one. His tendency to be mumbly and awkward and withholding fits his character perfectly. And Hedges, as a temperamental teenager working through loss in his own authentically teenage way, is a real discovery. Michelle Williams, as Lee’s ex-wife, doesn’t get many scenes, but she cracks your heart open in the ones she has. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranNov 17, 2016
Powerful, emotional filmmaking that leaves a scar, Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By the Sea is heartbreaking yet somehow heartening, a film that just wallops you with its honesty, its authenticity and its access to despair. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Nov 16, 2016
Manchester By The Sea sweats the big stuff and the small stuff, and that’s key to its anomalous power: This is a staggering American drama, almost operatic in the heartbreak it chronicles. Read full review
100
Rolling StonePeter TraversNov 16, 2016
No film this year has moved me more with its humor, heart and humanity. Read full review
100
Village VoiceApril WolfeNov 16, 2016
A poignant, surprisingly hilarious depiction of death, grieving, and small-town life. Read full review
100
We Got This Covered Darren RueckerNov 16, 2016
It’s a movie where even seasoned cinemagoers who feel like or claim to have seen everything are likely to marvel at how director Kenneth Lonergan was able to achieve something new, interesting, painful, hilarious, or beautiful, or some combination of all these things, in every single scene. It’s the type of movie that makes a person reach for the nearest hyperbole to describe it. Read full review
100
New York Daily NewsStephen Whitty Nov 16, 2016
Despite his draw to tragic subjects, Lonergan holds onto a sharp, dark, Irish sense of humor, and a feel for the absurd that comes out at the most unexpected times. A playwright's sense of what actors do, too. Affleck gives a career-best performance here. Read full review
100
USA TodayBrian TruittNov 16, 2016
Manchester finds a way to weave together truly wrenching sequences with a clever sense of humor, and Lonergan pulls extraordinary performances from his entire cast, especially Casey Affleck. Read full review
100
ObserverRex ReedNov 16, 2016
Manchester by the Sea is the best movie of the year. Read full review
100
HitfixDrew McWeenyJan 27, 2016
Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By The Sea is an extraordinarily wise and well-observed film about what can happen to someone when life gives them more than they can handle, and Casey Affleck's lead performance is, simply put, the model of what great film acting should look like. Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua RothkopfJan 25, 2016
To say Lonergan has evolved further with his third feature would be an understatement: He toggles between his new plot’s years with the relaxed mastery of Boyhood’s Richard Linklater. Plus, he’s finally got a complex central performance that anchors his ambitions to cinema’s all-time great brooders. Read full review
100
VarietyJustin ChangJan 24, 2016
The persistence of grief and the hope of redemption are themes as timeless as dramaturgy itself, but rarely do they summon forth the kind of extraordinary swirl of love, anger, tenderness and brittle humor that is Manchester by the Sea. Read full review
100
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganJan 24, 2016
Kenneth Lonergan’s deeply moving return after the travails of Margaret shows what a rare storyteller he is, measuring out his narrative beats in a world which crackles with life, guiding Casey Affleck’s magnificent performance, instantly recognisable as a career-be Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriJan 24, 2016
Lonergan is the master of taking a scene that starts off as something familiar, then sending it spinning off in another direction, and then pulling back at just the right moment, as the viewer’s imagination hurtles ahead to fill in the gaps. Read full review
95
The VergeChris PlanteDec 12, 2016
It’s a methodic meditation on living with pain that can’t be shed, and in the oily-black corners of our shared fears, Lonergan has discovered something beautiful, human, and new. Read full review
91
The PlaylistNoel MurrayJan 24, 2016
Manchester by the Sea is the kind of movie that doesn’t seem to be headed anywhere in particular for long stretches. And then, almost unexpectedly, it arrives. Read full review
91
The Film StageJordan RaupJan 24, 2016
There are no clichés here, and Lonergan flawlessly carves out the most sincere moments to reveal a sprawling, deeply affecting odyssey of emotional recovery. Read full review
90
Little White LiesSophie Monks KaufmanDec 1, 2021
There is too much going on in Manchester by the Sea and still it is among the best films of this or any year. It is too funny, too tragic, and too full of nods to all manner of movie genres. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekNov 21, 2016
Casey Affleck is both the soul and the anchor of the movie. Read full review
90
The New YorkerAnthony LaneNov 21, 2016
Even if you love the film, as I do, all the lurching, stop-and-go exchanges of these unquiet souls may leave you with a craving for “The Philadelphia Story,” or something equally streamlined. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. ScottNov 17, 2016
Mr. Affleck, in one of the most fiercely disciplined screen performances in recent memory, conveys both Lee’s inner avalanche of feeling and the numb decorum that holds it back. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyJan 24, 2016
Lonergan layers and then layers some more, allows his characters to stew, not always disclose themselves and then come to decisions and changes naturally, or after due deliberation. And they can relapse and not always be ready for the breakthrough moment toward which the story seems to be pointing. The result is something that feels more akin to a full meal than the usual cinematic popcorn. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 9, 2016
It’s not cinematic fast food. If you want superficial entertainment, Manchester by the Sea will disappoint. This is for those who crave a deeper experience. Read full review
88
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 30, 2016
What Lonergan has created here is one of the cinema’s defining statements on the kind of grief that leaves you gutted, of wounds that will never heal. He’s got the guts to make us uncomfortable in scene after scene, and the courage to deny us “The Hollywood Ending.” Read full review
88
Philadelphia InquirerTirdad DerakhshaniNov 22, 2016
At turns elegiac, absurdist, and gently satirical, Lonergan’s drama is a deeply affecting chamber piece that features an outstanding performance by Casey Affleck. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineChristopher GrayOct 2, 2016
Kenneth Lonergan's film gradually comes to its sense of exquisitely calibrated, hardened intimacy. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnJan 25, 2016
It's Lonergan's masterfully subtle writing, littered with awkward exchanges that speak far louder than any cohesive monologue, that gives "Manchester" its humanity. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyJan 6, 2017
Lonergan is so precise with his actors, the sense of place, and the level control of tone that you feel him methodically striving here to avoid false notes. Read full review
80
CineVueBen NicholsonSep 10, 2016
Comedy is used to undercut the most horribly tragic of moments...given the sadness all the more pathos and offering glimpses of hope in a narrative resistant to catharsis. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleNov 30, 2016
Affleck is magnificent, but the movie is something less than that, because it can’t completely overcome some built-in challenges. Read full review
70
TheWrapRobert AbeleNov 16, 2016
A movie that, if never exactly a cathartic experience, carries you along in its clenched grip with an undeniable power. It’s sad and funny and real. Read full review
67
MTV NewsAmy NicholsonDec 1, 2016
At Lonergan's best, he turns the sounds of Patrick's home into its own claustrophobic, percussive sympathy. Read full review
60
The GuardianLanre BakareJan 24, 2016
Manchester-by-the-Sea is a study of family dysfunction and the worse loss imaginable, but one held back by the fact it’s all filtered through Affleck’s withdrawn lead. Read full review
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