Every Day: Critic Reviews

It's hard to empathize with the family in the indie drama Every Day when each member is so sitcom-ready.

Very well written and acted, Every Day feels like a glorified television drama softened with comic and surreal trimmings, with a mildly upbeat ending appended.

What distinguishes Levine's film from, say, last year's similarly themed (and irredeemable) Happy Tears is his cast -- and not just reliable vets like Schreiber.

Real life isn't choreographed for maximum impact, it's messy and unpredictable. At its best, so is "Every Day."

Every Day is too relentlessly depressing to recommend to the everyday audience. It seems to be on automatic pilot. Horrible, sad things keep happening, but it just goes on.

A 42-minute TV soap has more story than this limp and familiar tale of domestic woe.

What makes this intriguing, yet woefully uneven film so relatable is that there is nothing about Ned's experience that seems extreme.

There's something oddly remote about Every Day, which plays like a double-wide version of a perfectly acceptable Showtime pilot. [Blu-ray]

...wears out its welcome long before the end credits roll...

Seems like a first draft that piles up the characters and their issues without assembling them into a dramatic whole. Someone was in a rush to get the cameras rolling.

There are sharp moments throughout.

Low-suds soap opera about the trendy "sandwich generation" travails of a hip, well-off New York family.

Complicated relationships fail to enliven grown-up drama.

A film of pleasantly half-sketched domestic noodling that comes across as inconsequential because it never really tries to bring substantive conflict to the fore.

Auds will be wise to the contrived metaphors and realize there's not much going on below the surface except stock discourse.

It's a recognizable situation that should be easy to sympathize with. Yet the movie makes it hard for most of us to recognize ourselves in this couple or sympathize with their struggles.

An unrelentingly depressing drama about a family drenched in disappointment, despair, anger, and loneliness.

Swims in mock profundity and has the feel of a movie made specifically for a forgiving festival audience.

Levine didn't need hysterics to find an appropriate ending, with the established atmosphere of chaos and regret interesting enough to carry matters all the way to the final frame.

Schreiber approaches the role with a seriousness that lacks joy or any other colorful inflection, as if every second of his character's life, even the pleasurable ones, is weighing on him like an albatross.

Shreiber and Hunt impart an aching reality to their every line. And Miller is a revelation as the gay teen who's trying to develop a sexual identity before he is actually ready to have sex.

Hunt and Dennehy rise to it, investing their exchanges - which at their best are unexceptional and yet exquisitely painful - with lifetimes of regret and ambivalence.

An uneven look at modern family in crisis. Stay awake during the slow stretches, the good footage is worth it.