Metacritic reviews

Gabizon is not making a documentary here or attempting any realism. “Longing” is a manifestation of how grief makes emotions overtake reason and the inherent resilience that sometimes requires you to come back to reality. That reality will be diminished but somehow make you whole.

This is a welcome and unusual movie, and Gere gives a compelling performance.

Whatever magic that writer/director Savi Gabizon brought to the original seems to have evaporated for this second go.

While Longing was aiming for poignancy, it unfortunately landed on preposterous.

Whatever intrigues, insights and darkly comic charms writer-director Savi Gabizon gave audiences for his oddball Israeli dramedy “Longing” are mostly lost in translation in a Richard Gere remake he filmed in Canada.

A tonally bizarre and dramatically inert feature that is so detached from baseline human emotion it might as well be the fever dream of Artificial Intelligence, the new Canadian-Israeli film Longing is the most frustrating cinematic experience of the season.

Plausibility complaints always feel cheap, but Longing strains credulity well past the breaking point.

Instead of being drawn in by Daniel’s spiral, we observe it from a distance. The result is that Longing, presumably intended as a cathartic meditation on grief, simply feels absurd.

It’s a film that’s full of love, but it’s an unhealthy love that’s detached from reality and the movie seems detached as well. It’s too maudlin to convey its own moral complexity and too foreboding to be sentimental.