95% Weekend

All Critics (65) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (60) | Rotten (3)

It's a definitive example of naturalistic moviemaking -- you feel you're breathing the air that the characters are breathing.

Its final moments offer a vision of what a contemporary romance can achieve: an appreciative gasp of truth, a wet-eyed hope for more.

One of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers.

If you've ever met someone who changed your life in the space of days, you'll relate to something in this movie.

The organ that "Weekend" is most concerned with isn't the one you might think, but the human heart.

In just a short period of time, a weekend hookup tests the boundaries each man has set for himself.

Deserves to find a place in the hearts of wistful romantics everywhere, no matter what their sexual preference.

It's splendidly played with an understated intensity that deftly captures the shifting emotional tone of the relationship.

Offers up the kind of subtle, truthful relationship drama that's all too rare in cinema.

There's a fresh, sweaty, honest, unpretentious air to it, and when they part, with Glen on his way to spend a year working in Portland, Oregon, we genuinely believe that something like love has come into their yearning lives.

Writer-director Andrew Haigh has a delicate, sensitive touch, and this is appealing as a simple peek into modern romance... but there's a sense of wishful thinking -- or even desperation -- that I suspect is not intended here.

There's a deceptive simplicity to British writer-director Andrew Haigh's poignant, fluent character study, which has already earned comparisons to Before Sunrise.

Haigh treats his subject matter with matter-of-fact realism. If this is a new voice on the British film scene, it's a refreshingly adult one.

It is a tender, humane film, with an easy, unforced cinematic language: a film that doesn't need to try too hard.

Haigh's film is written with a shrewd, unpretentious feel for the way young people behave when they're getting to know each other, shot with a keen eye for urban solitude, and completely nails its seemingly modest tasks...

Haigh, writing, directing and producing, drives through the meeting-cute introductions and the medium-molten sex scenes as if they were merely marks on the map, to follow the simple, complex arc of an evolving love affair.

Impressively directed and superbly written, this is an emotionally engaging and strikingly naturalistic romantic drama with terrific central performances from newcomers Tom Cullen and Chris New.

A remarkable film that signals an exciting new voice in the LGBT landscape.

Sexy, provocative, engrossing and occasionally ornery, it should appeal to anyone whose curiosity about someone new has provoked them to question their own identity.

Terrific low-key turns from the two leads inject their growing bond with genuine emotion, making this a love story that will get under the skin of romantics everywhere.

Cullen and New are British stage actors with little background in film. Haigh's only previous film was a documentary. Perhaps because they don't feel bound by a set of rules, they've created one of the year's most enjoyable surprises.

Weekend is the year's wittiest hymn to romance.

Weekend might be a small film recounting an intimate relationship, but it speaks to the grandest of ideas.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/weekend_2011/

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