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The Roads Not Taken

2020

Sally Potter

Elle Fanning, Javier Bardem, Salma Hayek, Laura Linney ...

4.3

614

Drama The story follows a day in the life of Leo (Javier Bardem) and his daughter, Molly (Elle Fanning) as she grapples with the challenges of her father’s chaotic mind. As they weave their way through New York City, Leo’s journey takes on a hallucinatory quality as he floats through alternate lives he could have lived, leading Molly to wrestle with her own path as she considers her future.

	Author	Review
United States	Deborah Young The Hollywood Reporter	"Javier Bardem and Elle Fanning are commanding actors who give it all they’ve got to make their characters realistic, but while the film can be intriguing, it is never truly moving"	NEU
United States	Peter Debruge Variety	"Sally Potter takes audiences on a painful journey into the mind of a man coping with what looks like dementia (...) An exasperating puzzle with most of the pieces missing"	NEG
United States	David Ehrlich IndieWire	"A heartfelt but moribund drama (...) Potter’s film makes an earnest but enervating attempt to erase mental boundaries"	NEU
United Kingdom	Tim Robey Telegraph	"Potter’s gruelling, fragmentary, and certainly fun-free new psychodrama, which feels so divorced from anything we’d like her to be doing it’s as if the body snatchers have landed (…) Rating: ★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	John Serba Decider	"Fanning’s efforts make 'The Roads Not Taken' a potentially cathartic watch, especially for those close to the subject matter — and if you don’t mind the movie’s depressing tone."	POS
United States	Jack King The Playlist	"Sally Potter disappoints (...) 'The Roads Not Taken' contains all the subtlety of a loud klaxon (...) The script relies on the melodramatic when what is required is delicacy"	NEG
United Kingdom	Lee Marshall Screendaily	"Two bravura performances [Fanning and Bardem] can’t disguise the thinness of a script that exposes just how uninteresting this 'sliding doors' game can be"	NEU
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"[It] refuses to come to life (...) 'The Roads Not Taken' leaves us feeling as lost as Leo (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	Tomris Laffly rogerebert.com	"Fanning delivers a performance of such astonishing depth and emotional range that her presence here is both a relief and strangely frustrating, since the film that surrounds the young actor is sadly no match for [her] (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"	NEU
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"It’s a chamber piece in many ways, but with bold flashback excursions that come close to causing its emotional engine to overheat (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	NEU

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