The Place Beyond the Pines

Directed by Derek Cianfrance

(R)

**

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Here’s a promising film done in by its own ambition, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. This third feature from the director of Blue Valentine “looks great throughout,” and it showcases strong performances by Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper as a good-guy criminal and the cop who terminates his crime spree. But the three-part story “feels reasoned out rather than felt,” and in its attempt to say something big about father-son relationships, the final act “plunges off a cliff” into Afterschool Special territory. The movie “holds your attention from moment to moment” but “feels patchy and underdone,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. Apparently, the most talented people in film “now just start shooting a script as if big ideas and directorial vision were enough to hold a movie together.�� But smarter plotting helps too. The actors deserved better, said Simon Abrams in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Tacky and nonsensical dialogue” spells out all the big themes, while “pointless aesthetic flourishes” distract from any actual drama. Worse, the complete package is less than the sum of its many unsatisfactory parts.