Away We Go: Critic Reviews

A gilded entry in the cinema du quirk. It's a movie that invites you, all too often, to feel superior to the people on screen. Yet it's been designed, shot, and edited with unusual finesse, and the two main characters are fresh screen types.

Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don't be silly. But don't be fooled. This movie does not like you.

Away We Go has an easy, no-particular-place-to-go looseness that doesn't bear too close a scrutiny, but has a certain likability.

Away We Go is an exploratory and occasionally bittersweet trek that takes unexpected turns and winds up in an emotionally satisfying place.

Feels like a welcome respite from the false happily-ever-afters of most mainstream movies.

Mendes can't entirely surmount the smugness that pollutes Eggers and Vida's picaresque script.

It's too bad [the writers] didn't follow their slacker protagonists' example, and amble slowly through their cross-country road trip flick. Instead, they all labor overtime to mark every stop along the map, usually with neon signs and flashing arrows.

Away We Go pleads so earnestly for emotional resonance that it forgets to earn any.

Some of the episodes are ripely satirical, others almost heartbreaking.

Sam Mendes' Away We Go is a film for nice people to see.

Glib and charming in roughly equal measure, the road-tripping "Away We Go" is worth seeing for Maya Rudolph, best known for being underutilized on "Saturday Night Live."

Glib and charming in roughly equal measure, the road-tripping "Away We Go" is worth seeing for Maya Rudolph, best known for being underutilized on "Saturday Night Live."

The unassuming performances by Krasinski and Rudolph help make this the first Mendes movie that feels lived-in rather than staged.

By my count, two episodes succeed and half a dozen fall flat. Your mileage may vary.

It's hardly painful, but it's not exactly thrilling, either.

Mendes, working from a script by husband-and-wife hipsters Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, ends things in a vaguely haunting way without really resolving them, which is a good thing.

Director Sam Mendes fails to make them as beautifully fragile as he wants to.

Away We Go makes a nice metaphor for a rootless, self-involved culture of parents trying to get it right and getting all the wrong advice as they do.

Away We Go is dead-end Quirkville, penned by real-life couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, successful authors taking an unfortunate wrong turn into movie writing.

Krasinski and Rudolph make a convincing, uncertain young couple, a bit smarter than the usual slacker set.

The main sin of Away We Go is simple dullness.

Away We Go is like a disappointing term paper by a promising student.

Terrific performances make this tender if slight little film worth the trip.

Away We Go rejects those cliches and instead takes an honest, humorous and ultimately moving look at the prospect of a family growing from two members to three.