95% Stories We Tell

All Critics (41) | Top Critics (21) | Fresh (39) | Rotten (2)

Don't be fooled by its deceptively simple title or the hesitant, unassuming way it begins. Writer-director Sarah Polley's "Stories We Tell" ends up an invigorating powerhouse of a personal documentary, adventurous and absolutely fascinating.

A brilliant, thought-provoking documentary.

A fascinating variant on the documentary form that examines what we see, and how we see it.

Even calling ''Stories We Tell'' a documentary seems rather limiting and not entirely accurate; it's also a deadpan comedy, a juicy melodrama and a gripping mystery, all cleverly blended together with great focus.

An exercise in family navel-gazing becomes something more meta - less about the stories themselves than about the often uproarious ways in which people tell stories.

Polley is a good filmmaker but in the end, "Stories We Tell" feels less like a film than a family album - and one best appreciated, not by us, but by the Polleys still to come.

Where Polley's work goes from mere family movie to something much greater is in how she uses her own quest for answers to illuminate why & how we tell stories in the first place, especially in the form of film.

Polley's compassion and curiosity again mark her as both a heartfelt and unforgiving filmmaker.

Suspenseful, unpredictable, mature, tender and funny. A triumph.

The movie is convincingly built around the essential truth that we are ultimately defined by our loved ones' memories and perceptions.

A genre-twisting documentary with a fictional vibe that playfully bares the elusive truths about a family of storytellers.

Sarah Polley has blossomed as an actress and, more recently, as a daring and original filmmaker with an Oscar nomination to her credit.

Sarah Polley has quietly and steadily proved that she is a filmmaker to watch.

I want to start a campaign right now to get Sarah Polley the first screenwriting nomination for a documentary.

[an] engrossing documentary exploration of how the bricks of memory are untidily piled together to create messy and incomplete personal stories, and out of those stories comes a life.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/stories_we_tell/

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