Here are review links for this film submitted by our members:
- Jason Bailey @ Flavorwire
- Excerpt: I won’t pretend that ‘By the Sea’ isn’t crippled by considerable flaws: bouts of outright silliness, patches of dialogue that border on self-parody, an admittedly languid pace (though I find myself falling into their rhythms, rather than resisting them), and a soapy third-act reveal that turns out to be pretty small potatoes. Yet there’s something unshakable about it, and something remarkable about the fact that it exists at all — that a major studio is releasing a film this (seemingly) personal, written and directed by a female filmmaker, which so eagerly subverts the sympathies and personas of its superstar leads.
- Chris Barsanti @ Film Journal International
- Excerpt: Angelina Jolie Pitt’s fashionably decrepit romance stars herself and Brad Pitt as a voyeuristic couple on the rocks.
- Nicholas Bell @ Ioncinema
- [New – 1/7/16] | Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: If only a central device of the film weren’t so problematic or its conclusion so overwrought, “By the Sea” might have been one of the great films about marriage.
- Mark Dujsik @ Mark Reviews Movies
- Excerpt: [A] curious movie that can’t decide if it wants to be enigmatic or forthright.
- James Jay Edwards @ FilmFracture
- Susan Granger @ www.susangranger.com
- Excerpt: Tepid & pretentious, it sinks in slow-paced self-indulgence…
- Vadym Grygoriev @ kinoblog.com [Ukrainian]
- Courtney Howard @ FreshFiction.tv
- Excerpt: Cutting, provocative, introspective and wickedly astute, the elegant art-house melodrama juxtaposes beauty with the ugliness of the institution.
- Jeremy Kibler @ The Artful Critic
- Excerpt: By the Sea is not commercial and too low-energy to reach a mainstream audience, but those attributes make it intoxicating more than not.
- Pat Mullen @ Cinemablographer
- Jason Pirodsky @ Expats.cz
- Excerpt: Jolie’s finest film as director following In the Land of Blood and Honey and Unbroken. If nothing else, it’s undeniably elegant and refined, a beautiful thing to look at and get lost in.
- Jerry Roberts @ Armchair Cinema
- Excerpt: It becomes obvious early on that whatever prompted Pitt and Jolie to make this movie is probably more interesting to them then it is to us. The story is as dull as dishwater, and that’s all the more frustrating because we know how spirited and engaging these two are. By the Sea is a struggle to sit through. It is less a story then a test of your patience.
- Frank Swietek @ One Guys Opinion
- Excerpt: A pretentious but vapid tale of marital distress that comes off as a pure vanity effort modeled, absurdly enough, on Antonioni’s famous films of nihilistic alienation.
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