60
Anders Danielsen Lie gives a compelling, deep-etched lead turn, and you'll find yourself drawn in as he searches for a reason to continue living.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
Talented Norwegian Joachim Trier - distant cousin to the better-known (and Danish) Lars - delivers a wonderful, melancholy character piece that's funny and tender, and as fresh as a breath of Oslo sea air.
80
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
Crosses the blood-brain barrier like … like … whatever the drug is, I haven't tried it, thank God. The movie eats into your mind - slowly.
80
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
Trier's voice and vision, are thrillingly unique. His ever-searching camera, which never stops moving, takes us into places we've never been, know too well and won't soon forget.
80
Organizing the mercurial emotions and tics is director Joachim Trier, making good on the promise of his 2006 feature debut, the lit-related drama Reprise. This one's even better-it's about the honesty that often takes root in survivors, a rarely explored subject-but Oslo, August 31st is not an easy film.
100
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Trier's compassion for what it takes to survive, mixed with the love he bestows on Oslo, is rewardingly profound.
80
Village Voice by Melissa Anderson
Matching the precision of the film's title, remembrances of things past-whether destructive or salutary, quickly mentioned or dilated upon-are shaped by just enough exacting detail.
80
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
An intelligent and resonant work from Norwegian director Joachim Trier, a movie that yields up its meanings and implications slowly.
83
Trier doesn't allow the bleakness of the material to swamp the film in a miserablist tone, but he doesn't hold back, either, in revealing every hairline crack in Lie's fragile psyche.