Reviews for this film from our members:
- [New – 4/3/14] | Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: What I found in Stories We Tell is not so much an exploration of what ‘truth’ in any particular story is, but more about one woman’s need to call attention to herself, even if by doing so she tells all of us that she is basically a bastard, her mother an adulteress, and her father clueless.
- Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: It took a lot of bravery and candor to put this story out there in any form, and for that, [Sarah] Polley deserves all our thanks and respect.
- Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat @ SpiritualityandPractice.com
- Excerpt: A groundbreaking documentary written and directed by Sarah Polley about family secrets, memory, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
- Erik Childress @ Film Threat
- Edwin Davies @ A Mighty Fine Blog
- Excerpt: Much as the interviews reveal how different people have different interpretations of a single reality, Polley’s formal inventiveness and experimentation forces the audience to question much of what they have been told. In that respect, it’s reminiscent of Orson Welles’ F For Fake, though Stories We Tell is a much more earnest and less playful exploration of how we construct narratives from our own lives and experiences.
- Dan Jardine @ Cinemania
- Excerpt: Post-post-modern. Yeah, that’s right, the negation of the negation.
- Danny King @ The King Bulletin
- Excerpt: [An] exquisite, elegant rebuke to the standards that define so many of our most popular filmic narratives.
- Benjamin Kramer @ The Voracious Filmgoer
- Josh Larsen @ LarsenOnFilm.com
- Excerpt: Polley is genuinely intrigued in the project as both a daughter and a filmmaker.
- Peter Martin @ Twitch
- Simon Miraudo @ Quickflix
- Frank Ochieng @ SFcrowsnest
- Excerpt: Immensely thought-provoking and reflective, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Sarah Polley (‘Away From Her’) delivers an enticing documentary about the theme of obligatory dark family secrets and turns her unassuming project into an intimate and compelling jigsaw puzzle of mystery, reminiscence and probing personal discovery.
- Bev Questad @ It’s Just Movies
- Excerpt: A shocker of a family memoir, “Stories We Tell” captures a mother’s life, both secret and distressing, through the memories of those who knew her best.
- Jamie S. Rich @ DVD Talk
- Excerpt: Sarah’s intention is to find all the many facets of the truth, all the contradictions and faulty memories and misconceptions that allowed Diane Polley to bury her own narrative, and by doing so, making Stories We Tell not just a tale about a mother or a daughter or even the clandestine love affair. Each individual account is treated as truth, and the finished documentary is about a group of people and how they relate to each other and how their shared experience informs who they all are separately and as a unit.
- Jerry Roberts @ Armchair Cinema
- Excerpt: A great document about the ripple effect of family secrets.
- Tom Santilli @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: The different layers of truth and Polley’s incredible ability to simultaneously tell a story and examiner how stories are told, makes Stories We Tell one of the most personal, and most effective, documentary film thus far this year.
- Don Simpson @ Smells Like Screen Spirit
- Excerpt: It is a brilliant facade of reality that Polley creates, one that will leave its audiences’ heads spinning. We are left questioning the entire content of the film, though at the heart of all, there is more god’s honest truth to this film than most non-fiction films.
