Most Critics Sweet on Devastating Blue Valentine

Some critics are raving over Blue Valentine, a harrowing tale in which Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play a couple ripping apart at the seams. But not everyone is impressed with the film (whose infamous oral sex scene has gotten plenty of press).

• “This wrenching story of a marriage that rides a roller coaster for six tumultuous years is not to be missed,” writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. “Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams give two of the most explosive and emotionally naked performances you will see anywhere.”
• "This is the kind of movie about marriage Americans don't usually make," writes Dana Stevens for Slate. "Although the violence is almost entirely emotional, you walk out as devastated as if you'd seen a war picture."

• Joe Neumaier, writing in the New York Daily News, calls the film “a work so beautifully acted and emotionally honest it is my choice for best movie of the year.”
• But AO Scott isn’t so sure. The key characters “remain, for all their sustained agony and flickering joy, something less than completely realized human beings,” he writes in the New York Times.

(More movie review stories.)