Recensioni di Metacritic

Memory invites debate, rather than imposing a specific interpretation. It’s also a film that lingers, shifting and expanding in significance, even as the details start to blur.

Chastain and Sarsgaard give a pair of haunting, expert performances as damaged people making sense of their own agony together. Franco gets out of the way of his actors without manipulating them.

If a film like this were to have anything less than perfection from its leads, it would likely fall to pieces. Thankfully, the story comes to life in the hands of two veteran performers at their very best.

Chastain and Sarsgaard––ably supported by Josh Charles, Jessica Harper, and Elsie Fisher across the ensemble––are just fantastic, and find an ideal emotional register for Franco’s dramatic somersaults.

While hope is a quality not readily associated with the Mexican auteur’s work, it keeps surfacing here to extend a lifeline, even as we wait for the other shoe to drop. In that regard, Franco’s latest represents a slight departure, without surrendering the director’s signature austerity and intensity. He’s helped considerably by Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, two riveting leads who hold nothing back.

Mexican director Michel Franco’s somber drama about the ghosts of the past has a lot on its mind, and not all of it makes sense. But its two leads are so good together, so weirdly right together, that everything slips away and you just watch them.

A lot happens, story-wise, but if the film had just followed Sylvia and Saul learning how to be around each other, it would've been enough.

The film reveals itself as a prototypical yet surprisingly tender love story between two damaged people re-learning how to move through a world that’s unable to adequately support them.

Sarsgaard is characteristically impressive, his gentle performance holding onto its mysteries and maintaining a dry delicacy that eschews Hollywood demonstrativeness.

The two veteran actors share a lukewarm chemistry but settle into a competent balance between the diametrically opposed nature of their characters. Alas, as sharp as the duo might be, they cannot fight the moroseness that sets into the film’s latter half.