American couple Roland (Brad Pitt), a novelist in search of inspiration, and Vanessa (Angelina Jolie Pitt), a former dancer, travel to the seaside in the south of France in their silver Citroën convertible. They stay at an isolated hotel so he can focus on writing. They also hope the place's beauty and serenity will draw them together after a long period of stinging estrangement. Jolie Pitt writes and directs By the Sea, and the film unfortunately proves a disastrous vanity project. Its small scale and intimate subject indicate it is a personal project, a deeply felt creation, but it plays as smug, impersonal, and artificial. The only detectable, albeit remote, sign of life is Brad Pitt's unruly, frequently intoxicated performance; he brings an ounce of grit and magnetism to an uninteresting role. Angelina Jolie Pitt the performer, however, fails Angelina Jolie Pitt the director. Her turn is highly unconvincing and at times self-conscious to a painful degree, reducing Vanessa's purported despondency to a series of just-so poses and hairdos. And the project encircling these two stars as they indulge themselves is at once wafer-thin and heavily pretentious. The overarching air of imitation-art-house luxurious lethargy is amusing as an aesthetic exercise for a few minutes, but the two-hour-plus experience becomes interminable and torturous. There is nothing for the audience to grasp and contend with—no nuanced character, no developing idea—and, in a very foolish decision on Jolie Pitt's part, the source of the couple's grieving languor is treated as a plot twist to be teased and then unveiled with a bang. It instead elicits nervous laughter and groans.

D

Oooh, please do spoil this for me. I'll never see this.

She cannot have children and shouts, "I'm barren! Barren! BARREN!"

No one else going to brave this one?

I think I'm gonna check it out sometime this week.

Despite the fact that it probably sucks, I would like to see it but it hadn't opened here.

JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY

I mean, I know I have been warned, but...this movie makes Knight of Cups and Under the Skin seem like The Raid.

Yes this was bad. I knew going in that it was going to be slow but I thought that the two actors will make up for that. This was BAD and I did like the concept, some of the ideas presented but the movie has nothing that an audience can latch onto so it just fails miserably. The ending is also useless without the characters actually growing in here. I was hoping in the end to have good sex scenes but none came other than brief nude scenes sprinkled across.

C-