A good movie

Following their critical success 'Blue Valentine', Derek Cianfrance and Ryan Gosling decided to give it another shot with this movie which got a lot of buzz before its release. To be honest, even though I did like 'Blue Valentine', I thought it was slightly overrated but, here, they came up with something completely different which was pretty neat. Indeed, the most interesting thing about this movie was its peculiar structure. Basically, instead of using some flashbacks or some hyperlink gimmick, they basically gave us 3 different tales told chronologically but they were still linked somehow together making one intriguing story. Personally, I really enjoyed this construction and it was also a really interesting and unexpected approach to kill their top billing actor within 50 minutes. Still, I have to admit that this way of telling these stories also had its downside. Above all, even though those tales combined made for something really worthwhile, on their own, they didn't work so well. Basically, each time I was starting to get to know one of the characters, they would move towards another character and the biggest victim was definitely Eva Mendes. Indeed, even though she gave one of her best performances, she barely had anything to do here. To conclude, even though it wasn't a complete success, it was still a very strong drama with some solid performances and it is definitely worth a look. 


7/10