Heartbeats

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Lush cinematography and poetic images highlight this coming-of-age tale about two best friends, Mary (Monia Chokri) and Francis (Xavier Dolan), who meet a charismatic wanderer named Nick (Niels Schneider) and suddenly find their longtime friendship tested to its limits. As the love triangle between the three intensifies, Mary and Francis vie for Nick's affections in this intense story from Dolan, the Canadian prodigy who writes and directs.
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Netflix Rating: 3.3
NYT Review: Two friends, a young woman and man, pursue the same blond-curled object of desire in the Québécois director Xavier Dolan’s romantic, cinematically extravagant “Heartbeats." Read the review
Rotten Tomatoes: Fresh 72%: An art film to the max, Heartbeats intriguing and appealing premise is sometimes buried by director Xavier Dolan's filmmaking flourishes.
Fresh: 46 Rotten: 18 Rotten Tomatoes page
Top Rotten Tomatoes Critics: Spends 100 minutes dispensing painful examples of how infatuation turns people into idiots. full review

Stephanie Merry, Washington Post

Not too deep but oh so pretty, "Heartbeats" presents a hyper-stylized look at a love triangle, a sort of "Jules and Jim" for millennials. full review

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Alas, although Heartbeats is quite lovely to look at, there isn't much going on after all. full review

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Heartbeats" charts its own course. full review

David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle

All the dramatic protraction gets at both a heaviness of romantic desire and emotional viscosity. full review

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

Dolan is proving to be adept at and unafraid of teasing out the flaws of his characters, seemingly more concerned with whether they are interesting than whether an audience will like them. full review

Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times

It's a bright, slight romp that seems to want to zero in on the pain and trauma of romantic obsession. If the filmmaker weren't having such fun mocking characters who fall hard while pretending not to, it might just be able to achieve that. full review

Bob Mondello, NPR

"Heartbeats" looks good, and it has some funny dialogue. But there isn't enough to sustain the film's running time. full review

V.A. Musetto, New York Post

The new movie confirms Mr. Dolan as a wildly talented, carelessly extravagant filmmaker nakedly in thrall to idols like Wong Kar-wai, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Bernardo Bertolucci and Pedro Almodovar. full review

Stephen Holden, New York Times

The film couples high comedy with spiritual solitude. That's not just a slo-mo stunt, it's a cockeyed triumph. full review

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

[A] madly stylish Montreal-made delight... full review

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Xavier Dolan is the new darling of Canadian cinema, and it's easy to see why. full review

Rex Reed, New York Observer

An undeniable triumph of artifice, Heartbeats acts as a kind of bizarro fantasy mirror, aestheticizing and glamorizing the madness that arises from unrequited sexual obsession, as drunk on beauty and blind to truth as its deluded singles. full review

Karina Longworth, Village Voice

Girl likes boy who likes boy (or maybe he doesn't) sounds like that recent reality-TV scenario, but there's very little reality at play in this hollowed-out, tricked-up Montreal-based drama. full review

Richard Brody, New Yorker

Quebec director Xavier Dolan's follow-up to his precocious art-house hit, I Killed My Mother, is a sweet and creamy, puffed-up dessert of a film. full review

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail