Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love
Roadside Attractions | Release Date: July 5, 2019 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
69
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 19 Critic Reviews
Positive:
14
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
The New York TimesGlenn KennyJul 11, 2019
While Broomfield’s films often take a sardonic, close-to-cynical tone, “Marianne & Leonard” is admiring, affectionate and a little awe-struck. Read full review
90
Film ThreatHunter LanierJul 11, 2019
Taking on the melancholy, rain-tapping-a-window tone of Leonard’s music, Broomfield doesn’t try to draw a line through the story artificially but embraces the natural disorder of real life. Read full review
83
Original-CinJim SlotekJul 12, 2019
Though it kind of loses track of its marquee title character mid-movie, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love is a must-watch for Cohen fans, with copious concert and backstage footage. It is also a snapshot of a time, and of hedonistic artistic idealism. Read full review
83
TheWrapSteve PondMay 22, 2019
As befits its subjects, Marianne & Leonard is as much poetry as documentary — it’s a gentle, rhapsodic film, an emotional change of pace for its director and a moving portrait of a love that still resonates. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawJul 25, 2019
Marianne Ihlen emerges as someone of enormous gentleness and dignity. Read full review
80
CineVueTom DugginsJul 24, 2019
It’s a mesmerising watch for fans of Cohen’s music, a fitting portrait sewn artfully together, and given a greater intimacy by dint of the fact Broomfield himself spent time in Hydra in his twenties and befriended Marianne whilst there. The only glaring absence is the lack of commentary from Cohen himself on their relationship. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJul 8, 2019
My ideal Leonard Cohen documentary would contain another hour’s worth of concert footage and be screened outdoors on the island of Hydra. Otherwise, this is as full a filmed portrait of the man and his muse as you could ever hope to see. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Brad WheelerJul 11, 2019
Fittingly, given that the film from Broomfield (who was also a former lover of Marianne’s) is nothing if not a love letter itself. So long, Marianne. So long, Leonard. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonJul 10, 2019
Leonard & Marianne suggests that these were two immensely intelligent and talented people who never found happiness. The total love each person sought over the decades may have been right there all along. Or at least, it was there, in decades past, on Hydra. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayJul 9, 2019
Dutifully covering the rise, fall and final triumph of Cohen’s career, Broomfield relegates Ihlen to the background of her own story, before bringing her back for the film’s touching final act and devastating epilogue. Achieving the kind of balance to which Cohen always aspired, Marianne & Leonard is heartbreaking and heartening in Zen-like equal measure. Read full review
70
Rolling StoneDavid FearJul 3, 2019
What makes this film unmissable, however, is the fact that we get Marianne’s story more or less in full as well. It’s a fleshing out of someone who was more than just a muse, more than just an object of affection for a notorious ladies’ man, a famous singer and an infamous bastard. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranJul 3, 2019
Because Ihlen was never the public figure that the often idolized Cohen was, “Words of Love” eventually becomes as much a documentary on him as a record of a relationship. But that relationship does have pride of place, and as described by the participants in vintage audio and by people who knew him in contemporary interviews, it does fascinate. Read full review
70
VarietyDennis HarveyMay 22, 2019
It’s an entertaining flashback to an always-diverting countercultural epoch, with a touching footnote of a semi-famous love story at its center. Read full review
63
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyJul 5, 2019
Marianne and Leonard turns out to be a rather run-of-the-mill documentary about Cohen's journey, taking us down well-documented paths. Read full review
60
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonJul 3, 2019
While the title Marianne & Leonard sounds as if it’s out to give the female half of a famous partnership equal time, it does something quite close to the opposite. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyMay 22, 2019
The doc swells with wonderful archival footage that immerses you in the hedonistic environment the principals occupied, but in ranging wide it somehow doesn’t go deep, or at least deep enough, into its twin protagonists to satisfy as the full story. Read full review
58
IndieWireDavid EhrlichJul 3, 2019
“Words of Love” struggles to thread the needle between a conventional bio doc and a more specific portrait of two souls who found some kind of refuge in each other. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenJul 17, 2019
This footage is essential to this film, allowing us to view Marianne as a solo human being and not just as a muse to a great man. It is she who first noticed the figurative beauty of a nearby “bird on a wire,” not he. Yet this is also how the movie fails. Praiseworthy for finally providing some three-dimensionality to the figure of Ihlen, the film doesn’t go far enough in examining the plight of the muse. Read full review
40
EmpireElla KempJul 26, 2019
The lines between artist and muse are too clean cut to capture the visceral and intimate emotion of two lovers. Broomfield’s approach feels more intrusive than reflective, reducing the private story to public gossip. Read full review
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