Avis Metacritic

Affleck has always been a wonderfully understated performer and he has taken that minimalist approach with him behind the camera.

A superb performance by Affleck, who constructs a touching and believable rapport with his 11 year-old co-star, grounds his low-key directorial and feature-writing debut.

Affleck carries a great deal of weight in the movie, but its Pniowsky who shines as the young pre-teen learning quickly what it means to be an adult.

Light of My Life delivers a lush variation on familiar elements, and wends its way to a tense final showdown that makes the wandering trajectory worthwhile.

Light of my Life is not a bad film, instead it’s a heartfelt, intelligent and earnest one (if a little tidy).

Affleck ratchets up the suspense and raises the stakes with the film’s third act, but takes his sweet indulgent time getting us there. He establishes the relationship and the characters in a patience-testing twelve minute opening scene.

"The Road" meets "Leave No Trace" with a sprinkling of another half-dozen sharper films, Light of My Life is Casey Affleck’s ode to the power of storytelling. Namely, Casey Affleck’s brand of storytelling: glacial, meandering, but not entirely ineffective.

What holds the film back is the familiarity of its elements.

The film’s ambitions might be on the limited side: it’s a clipped survival tale with little of the anguished spiritual dimension that end-of-the-world stories have summoned in the past. But Affleck has certainly surrounded himself with the right people.

Scene for scene, Affleck does a decent job of directing — his touch is soft, intimate, humane — but he has saddled himself with a script that isn’t entirely there.