Metacritic reviews

Honestly, it's refreshing to have a movie built around dance and dancers that emphasizes both art and character, especially after the tedious schlock of Gaspar Noé's severely anticlimactic "Climax."

Aviva is a palindrome, reflecting the film’s ouroboros-like narrative. It’s also a Hebrew name, which translates as “spring-like” or “fresh”–both adjectives applicable to the sensual and passionate Aviva. Love it or hate it, it’s… well, it’s art. I loved it, warts and all. Perhaps Yakin has finally discovered his style.

Explicit and spontaneous, Aviva is a film with several brilliant moments that sometimes loses its way in overly indulgent sequences and set pieces as it dares to chronicle nearly every intimate encounter its characters and many of their friends have over the course of about 40 years. While overly ambitious, Yakin imagines the private life your lover had before you with a sociological lens.

With a cast made up of dancers entirely, the resulting work feels like a bold, deeply personal, and psychological ode to the numerous facades of romantic relationships, both uplifting and gloomy.

Yakin and his terpsichorean cast take exhilarating chances of the sort all too seldom seen on screens these days.

Pride in frank eccentricity pushes at times into the unintentionally absurd. Still, it’s exciting how these dance sequences are treated like any other scene, and disappointing when the compulsion to justify them takes hold.

There is a sense of healing — emotional, personal, psychic, definitely and defiantly sexual — that this filmmaker seems to be chasing. The ultimate goal, however, is really just casting away creative shackles and just letting it all hang out without professional worry. Yakin has assuredly done that.

It’s an ambitious piece, but in the dance between experimental ideas and grounded storytelling, Aviva should have listened to her body.

The film fails to coalesce largely because viewers are left to wonder what joins the couple in the first place.

It’s on-screen onanism, and rarely more than that.