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By the Sea

2015

Angelina Jolie

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Mélanie Laurent, Niels Arestrup ...

4.4

1,884

Drama. Romance Set in France during the mid-1970s, Jolie plays Vanessa, a former dancer, and Pitt is her husband Roland, an American writer. As they travel the country together, they seem to be growing apart, but when they linger in one quiet, seaside town they begin to draw close to some of its more vibrant inhabitants.

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	Nigel M. Smith The Guardian	"Essentially By the Sea is Jolie Pitt's attempt at a European art movie (...) It's a vanity project that's hard to love, but fascinating to unpack. (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of five)"	NEU
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"The Pitts, it must be said, suffer gorgeously. But Jolie-Pitt's attempt to emulate European art cinema is a slow, sodden, stupefyingly dull take on a 1970s marriage gone bad. (...) Rating: ★ (out of four)"	NEG
United States	Todd McCarthy The Hollywood Reporter	"This languid piece of would-be art cinema will prove once again that even the biggest names in the world won't draw an audience to something that, in and of itself, has no reason for being"	NEG
United States	Scott Mendelson Forbes	"For those who know what they are getting into and actually crave this kind of cinematic experience, I heartily recommend it. But for anyone else, it will probably come off like a feature-length perfume commercial"	NEU
United States	Manohla Dargis The New York Times	"A landscape of classic feminine suffering (...) Jolie Pitt takes chances in “By the Sea,” including with the audience’s patience and its laughter, and it proves far more adventurous than her previous feature as a director"	POS
United States	Justin Chang Variety	“An unabashed vanity project that struggles to turn its own beautiful inertia into a virtue. (...) "By the Sea” always offers something to tickle the eye and ear, even as it leaves the heart and mind coolly unstirred."	NEU
United Kingdom	Tim Grierson Screendaily	"Admirably, Jolie is trying to make a barbed, grownup drama about commitment and grief, but she doesn’t yet have the confidence or filmmaking talent to match her aspirations."	NEG
United States	Ty Burr Boston Globe	"While 'By the Sea' can’t really be considered a good movie, parts of it are risky, touching, and genuinely, interestingly strange. True, other parts are mind-numbing, laughable, and insanely self-indulgent"	NEU
United States	Katie Walsh The Playlist	"A film that’s more difficult and complicated than necessarily enjoyable (...) But Jolie Pitt’s insistence on creating a piece that reflects the harsh inner state of a person struggling to understand herself as a wife and as a woman in the world is commendable, and demonstrates her growth as a filmmaker."	POS
United States	Alonso Duralde The Wrap	"A soporific drama that teeters on parody (...) If 'By the Sea' weren’t so aggressively humorless, it might almost qualify as camp, so unsuccessful is its pursuit of weighty drama"	NEG
United States	Leah Greenblatt Entertainment Weekly	"Jolie Pitt, who also wrote and directed, shows a lot of skin (her own and her cast’s) without ever really getting under it. Misery doesn’t just love good-looking company; it needs an emotional center and a satisfying narrative arc, too"	NEU

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