Critics reviews

A chilly and melancholic story of unrequited love... a rare grown-up drama with real stakes... What’s striking about this particular entry in the Phoenix-as-isolated-eccentric canon is its flavour of defeated animal loneliness. The hugeness of [his character's] suffering becomes claustrophobic given the smallness of his self-contained world; fitting, perhaps, for a film based on Dostoevsky.

In addition to being a pioneering stylist and overall champion of what is known as "humanist art," Dostoevsky was a vocal and enthusiastic anti-Semite. Therefore... the movie also attempts to apply Dostoevsky's artistic practices to a people he disdained. This is interesting not only for combustible questions of stereotype and representation, but for the ways the filmmaker relates to his characters and works to render their internal and external worlds.

Two Lovers has the improvisational intimacy of Cassavetes without the formal chaos. It's tense, moving, and complex, yet it is also, as Gray puts it, "sedate," taking in the emotion without boiling over, emerging both minimalist and exuberant in all the right places.

[Two Lovers] is one of the saddest and most evocative love stories filmed in recent years, as well as an extraordinarily precise and cogent depiction of a place and a milieu—the Russian-Jewish immigrant community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

[Two Lovers] is unafraid of the grand gesture, but this often looks oddly like an adapted stage-play... [The film] surges inexorably towards an awful betrayal, before doing a handbrake turn into a happy ending. There are good, heartfelt performances here, but the credibility gap was too wide to be bridged.

In its intimacy, this is a film which will appeal to European audiences. It is refreshing to see something which, unlike most romantic comedies, doesn’t follow a formula, though its theme is timeless.

[Two Lovers] is inhibited by its predecessors’ emotional opacity... Gray’s direction lovingly toys with images of containment and release, effectively playing out the drama in visual terms – but we never really feel it.

Two Lovers is not a great film, but it is a good one, perhaps even a very good one, a quiet exploration of the malleability of affection, the seamless gear-shifting of which both heart and mind are capable, the ways in which, whether we are aware of it or not, we are the authors of our own happiness and sorrows.

"Two Lovers" combines positive aspects of both the European and Hollywood traditions. As in a good European film, shots are allowed to breathe. The focus is on character and human emotion. At the same time, the movie shows an American concern for pace and story development. The result is the best of both worlds.

Though the story is no less familiar [than in Gray's We Own the Night] the results are frequently affecting... [and] the performances are solid: pulling inward in every scene, Phoenix taps into the New York loneliness that defined Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty, and Rossellini is excellent as the worried mother.

Fine performances--notably from Phoenix--still don't make [Two Lovers] an easy sell. But it is atmospheric, accomplished and intense.

"Two Lovers" is anything but traditional, romantic or a comedy. It is a film of unusual perception, played at perfect pitch by Phoenix, Shaw, Paltrow and the other actors. It is calm and mature. It understands these characters. It doesn't juggle them for melodrama, but looks inside.