Margaret

2011 Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

A young woman witnesses a bus accident, and is caught up in the aftermath, where the question of whether or not it was intentional affects many people's lives.

Anna Paquin J. Smith-Cameron Mark Ruffalo Jeannie Berlin Jean Reno Sarah Steele John Gallagher Jr. Cyrus Hernstadt Allison Janney Kieran Culkin Matt Damon Stephen Adly Guirgis Betsy Aidem Adam Rose Nick Grodin Jonathan Hadary Josh Hamilton Rosemarie DeWitt Glenn Fleshler Stephen Conrad Moore Gio Perez Matthew Broderick Jake O'Connor David Mazzucchi Jerry Matz Kevin Carroll Hina Abdullah Olivia Thirlby Kenneth Lonergan Show All…

Alternative Title

Маргарет

drama

149 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 25

just over four years ago, in my senior year of high school, i was driving home from my part-time job, speeding down the local hwy trying to get home as fast as possible so i could maybe finish watching a movie before i needed to get some sleep. it couldn't have been any later than 11pm but it was dark & dreary enough that my mind keeps trying to convince me it was closer to 1am. regardless, i didn't get home as fast as i thought i would. about halfway home i noticed shining spots on the road ahead, at the time i thought my eyes were fucking with me but it didn't take long for me to realize my headlights…
Review by Gabriel Gundacker ★★★★★ 10

Tossing around the idea that this is one of the best movies
Review by preston ★★★★★ 4

Held me spellbound for three hours, if nothing else (extended cut, fwiw). 25th HOUR-ish - New York movie, moral drama about Doing the Right Thing, symphonic score over jagged rhythms - also Desplechin-ish for the sweep and scale, but more ambitious than either: an epic of human disconnection, based around the fact that language is such an imperfect way of trying to connect - emotion is easier, but we lose it as we grow older ("It is Margaret you mourn for"), and of course Art is the best way of all, hence the ending - and around the fact that people are quite simply separate, everyone has a point of view (even the kid who thinks Shakespeare was talking about…
Review by adrianbalboa ★★★★ 5

everything Kenneth has ever written is like hey 😟 i know things are bad 😔 but guess what! 😳 they’re gonna get so much fucking worse for you 😋 and you don’t realize until after it’s over that he was talking to you the viewer ❤️
Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★½ 1

86/100
[Originally written on my blog.]
Odds are we'll never see a fully realized version of Lonergan's insanely ambitious formal experiment, but this "extended cut" (not "director's cut", please note) gets plenty close enough to thrill. To my surprise, it's not simply a matter of restoring tangential (but nonetheless crucial) scenes that he was forced to remove—turns out he had an elaborate, cacophonous sound design planned, of which there's barely a hint in the theatrical version. Sadly, that element still seems half-finished, becoming increasingly sporadic and clumsy as the film progresses; I'm not entirely sure whether certain bold, alienating effects, like having opera music and house music playing simultaneously during Paul's first scene, were what was intended. But this is…
Review by Branson Reese 5

I was really surprised to see that Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA’s Desert Origins poster on a teen boy in 2011’s bedroom until I found out the movie was actually filmed in 2005. Right on. I had that in my bedroom in 2005, too.
If you work for letterboxd can you make sure to bury this review so it doesn’t go to the top of people’s feeds? My whole deal is so annoying.
Review by Griffin Newman ★★★★★ 4

My mom and I went to see the extended Lonergan cut at The Quad. We held hands at the end and cried. (That second part isn't true.)
Review by nathan smith ★★★★½ 1

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

[whispering to date while watching Margaret when Anna Paquin first appears on the screen] That's not Margaret
Review by Hari Nef 2

seismic. my mom says i always love movies that are like plays
Review by kevintporter ★★★★½ 3

A playwright-driven master-mess featuring a scene of J. Smith-Cameron jacking off? Folks, do I even have to say it? This. Is. KEVINCORE. Four and a half stars!
Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 1

“it is Margaret you mourn for.”
Review by Adam Cook ★★★ 16

Much has been made of Margaret’s troubled journey to the screen; a journey involving lawsuits, multiple edits and a long delayed release. It only seems fitting that a film about a character’s internal turmoil and city’s trauma would have such a difficult gestation. Like the character at the centre of the story, the film is admirable in its intelligence but tough to actually like.
Margaret focuses on Lisa an articulate, self-absorbed and emotionally scattershot teenage girl. She goes against the convention of what a protagonist should be as it is nearly impossible to warm to her as a person, yet despite her prickly personality she feels like a believable teen and in that way is strangely relatable. Following a traumatic,…

Recent reviews

Review by 2cool2cum ★★★★½

Kenneth Loggins seems very much like a Feminist In The Bio, Asshole In A Relationship guy. That being said, Anna paquin’s performance is like a lightning rod to the emotional industrial complex that is Margaret. If you wanted something more painful and sprawling than Ladybird, here it is
Review by nile4life ★★★★

A great movie world/moment to immerse yourself into, mid 00s NYC mehses its teeth with your own fragmented life memories. Explores a very interesting approach to identity and grief and compelling to watch and hopefully rewatch. You can tell they knew it was good while they were making it, check it out.
Review by Pooki ★★★

(Theatrical Cut)
Incredibly messy and truncated, but it's hard to discount Lonergan's hodgepodge of ideas.
Review by MaryAnn 🐟 ★★★½

I watched the theatrical cut. Overall, I enjoyed the film. It was interesting to see the chaos surrounding the main character, Lisa's, life. Unfortunately, I didn't really connect with any of the characters, and that's what's keeping me from rating this higher. I think I'll be watching the 3 hour cut in the next month to see the differences, though.
Review by Simon Rask ★★★★½ 2

A few weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing how the eduction we have received throughout our lives has almost exclusively taught us to think logically (which, for the record, I believe is a good thing), but rarely ever creatively. Which is fascinating to me considering that my generation—the "Zoomers," as we're called—has seemed to have grown a knack for creating and/or absorbing an exorbitant amount of various forms of art, e.g. photography, music, painting, tv/movies. Granted, most of this art both made and consumed is absolute garbage (hence the absurd popularity of corporate content like the MCU and the abundance of mediocre photography/calligraphy/media pages on Instagram), but that is a discussion for another time and place. Anyway, the…
Review by Kevin Cavallo ★★★★

Not all of the creative choices work, but there aren’t a lot of films that put this much time and effort in exploring a character’s psyche.
Review by Helen_Kat ★★★★★

We don’t deserve Kenneth Lonergan. I’ve gone through life telling myself I don’t like the opera when maybe in fact I actually do.
“You’re a little c*nt”
“You’re a big c*nt”
Review by smj ★★★★½

me when i catch mark ruffalo back on that bus route
Review by Adam Solomons ★★★★½

I need to see the Lonergan cut don’t I
Review by Melissa ★★★★★

Despite Lisa’s obvious flaws and misguidedly self involved search for justice I admire her assertion in navigating the complex power dynamics she didn’t herself up against.
I am for some reason fixated on the Shakespeare scene where Matthew Broderick insists that the students interpretation is wrong - aside from the interpretations shared what else is this scene trying to comment on? Why doesn’t Lisa speak up? Why is the teacher so persistent?
I think what this movie left me thinking about most is how lost we can become in trying to do the right thing, especially because we can’t really see beyond/outside of ourselves.
Review by emma ★★★★½

i spent a lot of time watching this trying to figure out whether the movie itself has bad politics or it’s just a long series of parallels with the scene where they’re talking about king Lear and the kid says “just because Shakespeare had one of his characters say that doesn’t mean it’s what he believes” .. anyway idk but either way i think this is a very good movie about being a rich teenage girl whose self-centered world view is enabled by everyone around her, and a less good movie about “justice” (although that is probably the point)
Review by avaah ★

three hours of pretentious bullshit with the most annoying characters. could've been enjoyable if it just focused on the girl's inner turmoil after witnessing a bus accident and having to deal with the wrongful death lawsuit while her mother was busy dealing with her own relationship and career but instead we focused more on shitty political discussions and irritating people talking over one another saying the dumbest shit lol bye this was such a waste of my time. i could've watched three episodes of Ozark instead