Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams Praised at Sundance

Rolling Stone’s Pete Travers gave props to Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams giving for Blue Valentine. Watch an exclusive clip on MTV’s Movies Blog.

EW’s Owen Gleiberman:

No movie I’ve seen at Sundance this year conjures the possibilities — or the current, gloom-and-doom marketplace environment — of independent film more powerfully than Blue Valentine. A lushly touching, wrenching, and beautifully told story, directed by Derek Cianfrance with a mood of entwined romantic dreams and romantic loss, it stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as Dean and Cindy, a young, semi-working-class couple who meet, fall in love, get married, raise a little daughter, and lose their spark, though not necessarily in that order. Among other things, the movie fractures time with elegant originality.

He’s basically saying, in his review, indie movies may be having a more difficult time, but films like this one help to keep the genre alive, especially with this director and these actors:

In this movie, Gosling and Williams act without a net, and Derek Cianfrance proves a filmmaker of rare sensitivity. I predict he’ll go far, and Blue Valentine, whatever the new, handwringing forces of indie marketing decree, deserves to be the movie that takes him a good part of the way there.