Things We Lost in the Fire: Critic Reviews

A safely false, glamorized weepie.

A movie that, despite its fine acting, has the emotional impact of a general anesthetic.

Its deliberate pacing may put some viewers off, as will the bleakness of the subject matter, but it's worth seeing, mostly to soak up the complex shades of Del Toro's performance.

Things We Lost in the Fire veers away from the real and hard and toward the fantastic.

[Benicio Del Toro's] is the only character with human flaws, and in a movie perfect people tend to be boring.

Berry gives a riveting performance, but as a deeply decent man trapped in a hell of his own making, Del Toro gives the kind of career performance Berry gave in Monster's Ball.

Del Toro is the heart and soul, as well as the haunted, rubbery visage, of a story of grief and loss that would be fairly lifeless without him.

A supple and angular story of grief.

The movie is an engrossing melodrama, and it has its heart in the right place.

Consistently well-acted and, for a studio picture, pretty sharp on the subject of addiction and recovery and relapse.

Bier is one of the cinema's most acute observers of intimate relations, her Scandinavian reserve muting the inherent melodrama of her material, and she draws piercing, modestly scaled performances.

Lacks the urgency of [director Bier's] Danish films.

Serves as strong reminder of what a powerfully charismatic and completely natural actor Benicio Del Toro is.

Things We Lost in the Fire is certainly not a comedy, but it is definitely mordant with its two Big Themes: Loss and Addiction, both treated in a singularly heavy-handed manner, for which I blame primarily Mr. Loeb's screenplay.

A welcome relief from all the war and violence we've been getting lately, it's a wonderful, heartfelt experience, executed with meticulous principles and penetrating artistry.

A live-wire performance by Benicio Del Toro sparks an otherwise morose study of loss, addiction and catharsis.

This movie is the most irritating example yet of how both film and TV have taken to shooting even the phoniest, soapiest stories with that drunken, shaky, ultra- close-up camerawork that says, 'Hey, look at us! We're being all documentaryish!'

If this were a Susanne Bier film made on her home turf we'd feel a lot more wrung out by the movie's end. Instead we're just worn out.

Apart from the mobile camera and a moderately challenging time-jumping script, this is weepy women's cable-television fare of the tears-and-cuddles variety.

Things We Lost in the Fire deals frankly and openly with the wounds -- some obvious, some not so obvious -- that are left by the tragic, untimely loss of a loved one. At times, the film is unsparing.

An unstable mix of a tearjerker, junkie-recovery story and odd-couple pairing.

Bier, in her American debut, mostly keeps things simple and intimate, though, by using hand-held cameras, extreme close-ups and flooding the proceedings with spare, natural light.

Just watching Del Toro's eyes provides an emotional fire Allan Loeb's script can't hope to match.