Critics reviews

If the film has a flaw, it's that it flashes back once too often, upsetting the rhythm at the finish and making it feel a trifle too long. But in a film of this depth and sensitivity, that's a minor concern. The acting is exemplary. Gosling brings a preternatural understanding of people to his performance, and Williams is amazing in the way she keeps trying to deny emotion and conceal emotion, even as she's showing us.

Both Williams and Gosling give excellent, detailed performances, at once spontaneous and carefully considered, playing people who cannot understand or properly articulate their position... In some ways "Blue Valentine" is a lower-class version of "Annie Hall" without the wry humour and Allen's acceptance that nothing truly lasts, and that love inevitably fades

However admirable the acting and Cianfrance's willingness to leave things unspoken, it remains a draggy experience, with too little for the eye and the mind to feed on. Reticence is both its strength and its weakness... The film does not yield enough dramatic incident to back up its emotional meaning, namely: this marriage cannot go on.

It’s a rare balancing act that Cianfrance has pulled off, with moments of utter joy brutally offset by a vivid sense of anger and betrayal... Yes, there are fiery moments of passion and drama, but it’s "Blue Valentine"’s quiet, keening tragedy that knocks you down and keeps you floored.

There are powerfully committed performances here from its stars and executive producers, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams; this is a movie which puts its audience in close, sometimes stifling proximity to a dying relationship, and I occasionally felt that it resembled, just a little, an indulgent actors' project.

This wasn't a story with convenient hooks involving things like, you know, disease — things stories are familiar with. It was about inner defeat and the exhaustion of hope. I've read reviews saying Cianfrance isn't clear about what went wrong as they got from there to here. Is anybody?

A raw but beautiful picture of love uniting and dividing: tender, real and heartfelt.

"Blue Valentine" isn’t perfect: There are a few narrative details that feel contrived, a little pat... But the movie gets so much else right, from the careful hand-held camerawork by Andrij Parekh... to the sensational performances by both leads.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams give two of the most explosive and emotionally naked performances you will see anywhere. Just know you're in for a workout. Derek Cianfrance... directs in a storm of feeling, as if the movie was ripped from his insides. Maybe it was.

Even when transparently plumbing for depth, Cianfrance’s film is frustratingly surface-bound in ways that reflect, if not out-and-out misogyny, then at least a lack of interest in imbuing his female character with the rich interior life and complicated morality he gives his male lead.

That the specifics of the hows and whys of things are so unnecessary is perhaps what gives the film such a feeling of reality... Though ["Blue Valentine"] sometimes frays around the edges too, in Williams and Gosling, Cianfrance has what he needs to keep us invested.

The performances are so gripping that the movie works despite its diagrammatic structure, which focuses on ironic rhymes between past and present and omits the entirety of the couple’s marriage.