Margaret (2011)

70% of critics liked it
(69 reviews)
72% of users liked it
(2,452 ratings)

Margaret centers on a 17-year-old New York City high-school student who feels certain that she inadvertently played a role in a traffic accident that has claimed a woman's life. In her attempts to set things right she meets with opposition at every step. Torn apart with frustration, she begins… More Margaret centers on a 17-year-old New York City high-school student who feels certain that she inadvertently played a role in a traffic accident that has claimed a woman's life. In her attempts to set things right she meets with opposition at every step. Torn apart with frustration, she begins emotionally brutalizing her family, her friends, her teachers, and most of all, herself. She has been confronted quite unexpectedly with a basic truth: that her youthful ideals are on a collision course against the realities and compromises of the adult world. -- (C) Fox Searchlight

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Rating, Runtime: R, 2 hr. 30 min.
Directed By: Kenneth Lonergan
Written By: Kenneth Lonergan
Genres: Drama

In Theaters: Sep 30, 2011 Limited
Studio: Fox Searchlight

Critic Reviews

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
Ambitious, affecting, unwieldy and haunting, it's an eccentric, densely atmospheric, morally hyper-aware masterpiece...
Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
It's a passionate, fascinating mess, like its abrasive main character.
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
Margaret comes apart at the seams as you watch it, but it gives off a lovely light. Seek it out. You can thank me later.
Joe Baltake, Passionate Moviegoer
Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret': Brilliantly submerges a willing viewer in the scattered yet fascinating day-to-day activities of a privileged New York teenager
Richard Brody, New Yorker
For all its awkwardness and uncertainty, the film is a city symphony, romantic yet scathing, lyrical with street life and vaulting skylines, reckless with first adventure...
Tom Long, Detroit News
Margaret is a mess. An impressive mess, but a mess nonetheless.
Brian Orndorf, BrianOrndorf.com
What's here is borderline camp at times, intermittently revealing a promise of brilliance perhaps left behind for good in 2005.
Chris Hewitt (St. Paul), St. Paul Pioneer Press
It's a challenging movie, but it pays off in big ideas and stunning performances.
Graham Young, Birmingham Mail
Rather like Clint Eastwood's Hereafter, which also starred Matt Damon, there is certainly a good film in here trying to get out and there's a neatly-emotional ending, but it's not as consistent as [director Kenneth Longergan's] You Can Count on Me.
Michael Dequina, TheMovieReport.com
Never has a troubled film project's off-screen drama played out so clearly in the release product.
Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times
Messy but masterful; a sprawling portrait of what it means to be a bright young woman who's realizing that the world isn't the warm bath of acceptance that her privileged life would indicate.
Shaun Munro, What Culture
Ambitious, stunningly-acted, smart, and astoundingly not outstaying its welcome despite a beefy run time, Margaret is destined to become a cult classic.
Charlie Lyne, Ultra Culture
Complex and elusive, the film weaves so many utterly believable and often devastating narrative strands that you wish Lonergan had got his way and released his initial 4hr cut
Anton Bitel, Eye for Film
Margaret is - or at least might have been - very much a film of its time, and that time was the mid-Noughties... now the film might easily be viewed as just another rites-of-passage indie - albeit an unusually multi-faceted one.
Ashley Clark, Little White Lies
Haunting and thought-provoking despite flaws; an important post-9/11 movie with its own troubled mythology.
Philip French, Observer [UK]
An intelligent, thoughtful film, the title of which comes from the "Margaret" addressed in Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" about growing up and growing old.
Charlotte O'Sullivan, This is London
Paquin, whose squirmy style of acting I've never liked, is astounding here...
Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]
Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically compelling to watch.
Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph
The acting is uniformly wonderful. It's a phoenix of a film, risen from the ashes of what looked alarmingly like failure, and it needs to be seen.
Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
No group of actors in a film ever had so little time to establish so much complexity or succeeded with such consummate skill.

Read all 22 critic reviews

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Featured Audience Ratings

William D

More than 10 years after his profoundly moving and artistic directorial debut "You Can Count on Me," writer/director Kenneth Lonergan brings us "Margaret," a highly ambitious but seriously flawed film starring Anna Paquin as a Manhattan teenager struggling to find… More
More than 10 years after his profoundly moving and artistic directorial debut "You Can Count on Me," writer/director Kenneth Lonergan brings us "Margaret," a highly ambitious but seriously flawed film starring Anna Paquin as a Manhattan teenager struggling to find her way in the world. The film starts out very well. One hour in, I thought that Lonergan had created yet another near-masterpiece. But at the end of the second hour (the film is an overly long two-and-a-half hours), I felt "Margaret" was a film that had come off the rails and become a chaotic mess. I am also not a fan of casting twentysomethings to play teenage characters. I feel it's an insult to teenage characters. Paquin never for a second seemed like a teenager to me. She seemed like a college student, an older one at that. This was a major flaw in my eyes. But there are so many things about this film that are amazing. And even the chaos had certain interesting things about it. The film is recommended for serious cinephiles who appreciate lofty artistic ambitions even when those ambitions aren't completely met. --unfinished--
Walter M

Currently, Lisa(Anna Paquin) has other things on her mind that go beyond being accused of cheating on a math test like the attention of Darren(Josh Gallagher Jr.) who sorta, maybe asks her out. In the meantime, she needs a cowboy hat for a future ranch trip with her father but cannot… More
Currently, Lisa(Anna Paquin) has other things on her mind that go beyond being accused of cheating on a math test like the attention of Darren(Josh Gallagher Jr.) who sorta, maybe asks her out. In the meantime, she needs a cowboy hat for a future ranch trip with her father but cannot find any on the Upper West Side until she sees one being worn by a bus driver(Mark Ruffalo). Tragically, she distracts him enough that he runs a red light, running over a pedestrian(Allison Janney) who dies in Lisa's arms. Lisa's mother, Joan(J. Smith-Camerson), would stay home to look after her but Lisa tells her that she is okay, leaving Joan to meet a handsome stranger(Jean Reno) after her performance on stage is over. On the one hand, "Margaret" is long and not without its share of flaws such as being indifferently edited at times(somebody sure likes his panaromic shots). And of the 8 or 9 possible endings, I'm not sure I agreed with the final decision. On the other hand, it is a smart and compelling look at a formerly spoiled young woman who comes of age by thinking beyond herself for the first time in her life by getting involved in a cause, even as she does some harm in the bargain. At the same time, the movie operates counterintuitively in being emphatic, not strident(to rephrase a semantic debate from the movie), in showing there to be more than one viewpoint in every story, although to be honest I have used stronger words than "corrupt" to describe Presidents. And by invoking "King Lear," with its sisters tearing apart their father's kingdom, the movie could be said to be denigrating teenaged girls in general(who the "Twilight" franchise notwithstanding, I usually have no argument with), for the carelessness of their actions.(My what language!). But it is not really their fault, as Lisa's behavior and those of her generation might be explained by the lack of any decent adult supervision or leadership but then this is 2006(the fare is $2.00 and you-know-who is still President), not 1995, so there is not as much to worry about.
Laurence C

Difficult and contrived, much like spinning into adulthood in a terminally fucked-up world can feel like. Lonergan has verve and social reviling to spare, and to watch almost none of his ideas cohere and yet crackle like very few other network narratives do nowadays gives the effect a… More
Difficult and contrived, much like spinning into adulthood in a terminally fucked-up world can feel like. Lonergan has verve and social reviling to spare, and to watch almost none of his ideas cohere and yet crackle like very few other network narratives do nowadays gives the effect a really disturbing read. By its final pages, Margaret proves to have transcended its horrifying post-producting trials and landed on the street as a real shot to the heart to whoever has decided to remain on its wounded wings. Paquin is incredible, and so are Smith-Cameron and Berlin.