"Luckily, some actors just act. It’s hard to think of a better-cast young couple than Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine. Two of the most beautiful blonds in the business are also two of their generation’s most fascinating actors — and it’s a thrill to see them working together. In a time-jumping, beautifully shot drama, they fall in love and get married, and then things unravel. There’s a fascinatingly unhinged scenario that plays out in a cheap sex hotel’s “Future Room” and a spontaneous song-and-dance scene that couldn’t have been more charming. It might sound a bit like (500) Days of Summer, but this raw-nerve drama couldn’t be more different. It’s wrenching, and the actors earn it. So far, critics are raving about the two performances, especially the parts when they’re in bed (which makes for some of the festival’s hottest sex scenes). The main criticism overheard is that this battle of the sexes seems unfairly stacked against Michelle Williams’s lover and skewed in the favor of Gosling’s sexy charmer, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, looks almost suspiciously like the film’s writer-director, Derek Cianfrance."