All Critics (98) | Top Critics (35) | Fresh (93) | Rotten (5)
Everyone has a different story. I found myself holding my breath listening to them talk. The story twists like a thriller.
Stories We Tell is not just very moving; it is an exploration of truth and fiction that will stay with you long after repeated viewings.
Part of the movie's pleasure is how comfortable the "storytellers" are with their director; you get a sense of a complicated but tight-knit family, going along with Sarah's project because they love her.
Never sentimental, never cold and never completely sure of anything, Polley comes across as a woman caught in wonder.
After you see it, you'll be practically exploding with questions - and with awe.
Fascinating personal documentary.
Slowly but surely Polley pieces together her own family's history to create a kind of cinematic narrative - complete with a twist straight from a soap opera.
An unconventional but wonderfully assembled exploration of how -- and why -- we tell stories, all wrapped in a closely guarded family secret.
Polley is savvy, using her talent as a director -- as a storyteller -- to give it universal appeal even though it's a very specific account.
Perhaps the most organic, transformative meeting of form and function I've seen this year.
Stories We Tell is cinema cutting to the profound truth of why we use narrative to make sense of the world.
For the most part, Polley's thoughts and feelings are pretty much absent, but the film makes some nice observations about memory and how it affects - yup - the stories we tell.
The movie isn't really about the Polley family: It's about memory, and loss, and forgiveness, and, through it all, hope. It'll knock you over.
What emerges is a fascinating and illuminating story, one that runs the gamut from intense joy to deep sadness and features a couple of surprising twists that take proceedings off in strange and unusual directions.
An honest and authentic documentary that powerfully explores the filmmaker's own family.
Polley's portrait of modern family life is a playfully profound discussion of narrative forms - the way in which we each construct our own reality through stories, part truth, part invention.
A decent piece of work, but too fussy for its own good.
Polley approaches every character with compassion, intent upon blessing them, and serving the audience with useful questions about how we seek the truth.
Polley is working in the tradition of Orson Welles, but her trickery can be exasperating; it also neutralises many of the emotional revelations.
With Away From Her and Take This Waltz, actress-turned-filmmaker Polley has proved herself as an unusually gifted director, but this inventive, moving documentary reveals even more artistic ambition.
What saves it is our realisation that it isn't just a documentary.
A bittersweet and compelling autobiographical family portrait.
Kane-like in its mirrored complexity, flashing in its mischievous irony, the story is a shiny maze which Polley enters knowing exactly where and what her Minotaur is - the secret of her paternal parentage - while spinning for us a thread to follow.
Polley ... smilingly tells us that a story like hers can never truly be tied down, even as she screws every last piece into place.
Polley's cine-tribute is a gripping and absorbing meditation on the unknowability of other lives.
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