Avis Metacritic

Marriage Story may often resemble a tug of war between its stars, but it’s on both of their sides.

Marriage Story puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves.

At once funny, scalding, and stirring, built around two bravura performances of incredible sharpness and humanity, it’s the work of a major film artist, one who shows that he can capture life in all its emotional detail and complexity — and, in the process, make a piercing statement about how our society now works.

Baumbach pulls no punches, and exhumes a personal calamity, most people wouldn’t have the stomach to sift through again. It’s wrenching stuff to be sure, but it’s also excruciatingly funny, loaded with empathy, compassion, and understanding too, featuring outstanding performances from its leads, Driver and Scarlett Johansson.

Featuring powerhouse performances by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, Noah Baumbach's divorce drama is a bruising tour-de-force.

With Marriage Story, Baumbach cements his reputation as one of this generation’s leading humanist filmmakers.

The brilliance of the movie lies in how it starts from a familiar place, then sneaks into transcendence.

Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script — Baumbach could never not be cerebral — to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

For all its strife and sorrow, Marriage Story is a generous film. It sensitively acknowledges the ways people fail each other, and the ways they don’t. It’s well worth your time. Maybe don’t watch it with your spouse, though.

Baumbach seeks to mine his material for laughs, no matter how desperate the situation becomes.