Metacritic reviews

It’s a tender, wrenching, and beautifully made movie, and part of what’s revelatory about it is that it’s a story of boomers who are confronting the ravages of old age (disease and death, the waning of dreams), yet they’re doing it with a stubborn echo of the hopes and desires they had when they were younger.

Jones makes both narrative and formalistic leaps, which won’t be spoiled here, that initially are jarring in comparison to the lo-fi aesthetic that precedes it, but truly open the film up to broader implications about how we hold onto the past events and how they constantly resurface.

The resulting film feels highly personal, tender yet unsentimental.

This is a movie that notices things and people that we are trained to ignore, and you are not likely to forget it.

Every moment in Jones’s film is so precisely textured that it becomes fantastical.

It’s a pinhole portrait of life on Earth; a non-judgmental story about trying to reconcile meaning with meaningless before the well runs dry and it rains again.

While not breaking new narrative ground, it’s a confidently-directed picture, even surprisingly ambitious in later passages. It’s all carried by a stunning performance by Mary Kay Place, whose emotional journey is as profound as it is ambiguous as she remains steadfast in her ways despite coming full circle.

If the intimacy of small town existence is cherished here, there’s also an ominous sense of that same life being eroded and undermined.

No wonder that cinematic auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Oren Moverman produced Diane. It brings to mind films like Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me, produced by Scorsese, or Moverman’s Time Out of Mind (which also dealt with memories, identity and the limits of human compassion). Jones may lack a little of the former’s humor or the latter’s visual artistry, but perhaps it’ll come later. The hard skills are all here.

An occasionally perceptive and endearingly un-commercial drama undercut by some serious narrative awkwardness.