Golden Exits

A movie that gazes deep into its characters' unhappiness and emerges with something searching, sad - and perilously close to likable.

Honestly, if it weren't for the performances this would probably be insufferable. But everyone in the film is good.

While you'll salute Golden Exits for never going full-on Fatal Attraction, it ends up feeling cagey, trapped in the realm of the theoretical and too hip to raise its tensions above a simmer.

The movie seems to be slowly pushing a needle into the lives that it scrutinizes, as if to draw a blood sample and learn what ails the characters.

These narcissists declaim their insecurities and grievances in the language of personal essays. What they're saying may be petty and small, but the rhetoric and imagery are transfixing.

Think early Whit Stillman without the archness, or Woody Allen without the schtick, self-seriousness or need for post-screening steel-wool shower, and you're almost there.

Golden Exits is too selective in its focus to give us a full picture of these lives, these relationships, and this general sense of dissatisfaction with it all.

Channeling Cassavetes ... Alex Ross Perry again adopts a handheld camerawork worthy of the auteur's looseness and unsuppressed delirium, wavering unevenly between the hopelessly unhappy characters as they try and fail to navigate their selfish emotions.

Golden Exits is a post love, post-passion and pro anti-depressant film. It is expressing its own curiosity at what it feels to be the inevitable conclusion of youth and living like there's no tomorrow.

The strong ensemble cast is unable to do anything of interest with the script; it's far too self-indulgent and offputting

Golden Exits is 90-minutes but it feels like three torturous hours...

I may be an old curmudgeon, but one with a better outlook on life and people than the characters in Alex Ross Perry's latest film.