Mike A.’s review published on Letterboxd:
Here's a film that, for me, is as fun to talk around as it is to talk about. While watching, and enjoying, it I kept thinking about how so much value in cinephilic discourse is placed on the foregrounding of artifice. Classical Hollywood is loved for its lack of realism, and for the way standardized production served to throw personal style into relief; and with nearly every major auteur besides, what's admired is heavy formal intervention. What we cinephiles seem to like most is when the director puts himself out in front, inviting us to parse his decisions.
Films like this one are, for me, a refreshing alternative to that ethic: they get their effects from transparency, from insidiousness and subtle persuasion. The use of music--pretty ill-advised, I think--works toward distancing us, but nearly every other major component of the movie works to seduce and convince. This is the type of practice that many highbrows are suspicious of, but I really enjoy it once in awhile. Sometimes I like to let my guard down.
I accepted the movie's depiction of life: the awkward silences, the recognizable domestic situations, the plausible psychology. I also accepted the shortcuts taken to make it all go down easy as entertainment. The knock against this type of middlebrow realism is that it's arrogant to invite such acquiescence in the viewer. I've never known quite what to say to that complaint, except that I can't see why an artist's vision of life has to be advertised as such, and I don't see what's so dangerous about viewers finding agreement with it. I'm perfectly willing to trust artists like Lonergan and his cast to put forth their approximations of human reality. And that's what it comes down to, I guess: trust.