Life Itself

2018 Directed by Dan Fogelman

Life will surprise you

As a young New York couple goes from college romance to marriage and the birth of their first child, the unexpected twists of their journey create reverberations that echo over continents and through lifetimes.

Oscar Isaac Olivia Wilde Annette Bening Antonio Banderas Mandy Patinkin Jean Smart Olivia Cooke Sergio Peris-Mencheta Laia Costa Àlex Monner Isabel Durant Lorenza Izzo Samuel L. Jackson Jake Robinson Adrián Marrero Kya Kruse Charlie Thurston Gabby Bryan Jordana Rose Caitlin Carmichael Bryant Carroll Carmela Lloret Grace Song Micah Stock Tony Manna Yvonne Szacki Noah Gaynor Ed Crescimanni Zach Page Show All…

Alternative Titles

La vida misma, Seule la vie, 人生如戏, 生活本身, Asta-i viata

romance drama

118 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by David Sims ½ 10

like having your brain pulled out through your nostrils
Review by kai ★ 3

one of the films of 2018!
Review by adrianbalboa ★★ 8

collateral beauty i KNOW it’s you
Review by megan ½

worse than life itself
Review by Wes ★½ 9

watching this movie while having a cold and being bedridden is like having sleep paralysis and the demons that are haunting your peripheral vision are oscar isaac and olivia wilde in their pulp fiction cosplay doing the whip and nae nae and all you can do is silently scream and pray for the mercy of a bullet
Review by kai ★ 6

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

NEGATIVES:
- the entire first half
- oscar isaac
- fundamental misunderstanding of academia
- weird casual homophobia
- mansplaining bob dylan directly to the audience
- TWO DIFFERENT NARRATORS
- typo in the subtitles (this matters to me.)
- exploiting mental illness/suicide for shock value
- oscar isaac doing a keg stand
- depressed oscar isaac with a beard ruining my enjoyment of inside llewyn davis by association
- misogyny
- like this movie just straight up hates women
- women are either young & stupid or they’re mothers and they die tragically after imparting wisdom to men, who are allowed to be real people
- amazon product placement
POSITIVES:
- annette bening’s wardrobe
- oscar isaac can pay his rent this year!
- antonio banderas
Review by ryan

'Oscar Isaac and folk music' is the new 'Ryan Gosling and neon'
Review by kevinyang ★ 16

Never before on screen have I seen filth so reliably spewed across multiple generations. This is an insult to the incredible cast, to the audience’s intelligence, and to anyone who has ever suffered trauma (or quite frankly, lived life in general). This is two hours of exasperating exposition, all doled out through monologues in which family trees are explicated with the subtlety of a guillotine. Actual serious issues are swept under the rug as the screenplay jacks off to its “interconnectivity” and idiot student thesis about life as an unreliable narrator. It isn’t until the last third when the film approaches anything resembling a story, but by then, it’s already warped itself into a manipulative, callous, and arrogant deformity. This…
Review by Allison M. 🌱 ★★★★½ 26

WHOA!
I was reading reviews either this or last week that had me deciding maybe I shouldn’t even see this movie. WHAT!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?! Then I read another couple of reviews in the last couple of days that made me think I should check this out (I almost ditched this to see the new Jack White documentary).
Some things in the story might come off as irrelevant or flippant, but these things are mostly justified. It does get a bit messy and jarring with the different narrators. It mainly works, though. I was definitely taken on an emotional rollercoaster. The plot points seemed thoughtful as opposed to contrived, so it mainly worked for me. The narrative was playful, yet deadly serious. The…
Review by Patrick Willems ★½ 5

STOP TALKING ABOUT BOB DYLAN
Review by karen h. 1

i have never sighed in exasperation so many times in a single movie! zero stars!!!!!
Review by josh lewis 5

made it through the first chapter, about 40 minutes, probably the worst screenplay ever written but i guess i'll never find out for sure.

Recent reviews

Review by Nels The Movie Guy ★½

Life Itself is a 2018 American drama written and directed by Dan Fogelman with an ensemble cast that includes Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Alex Monner, Mandy Patinkin, Olivia Cooke, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Annette Bening, Laia Costa, Antonio Banderas and Samuel L. Jackson, the latter of whom is featured in one of the most bizarre, misguided and ill-conceived cameos ever committed to film. It tells the story of two families, one from New York and the other from Spain, as their lives are intertwined by tragedy, coincidence and the beauty of life.
This film is way more interested in making the audience feel sad than it is in making its characters interesting or in telling its story properly. It feels as if…
Review by tali ★★★½

ok so letterboxd hates this movie apparently but it’s a tearjerker and i refuse to bandwagon hate this movie. ANTONIO BANDERAS OK I LOVE HIM
Review by Josh ★★★

Much like Book of Henry, I don’t see why this is so incredibly hated. Yes, it’s contrived and corny, but it works as a melodrama. Misguided at times too, but there’s nothing (I can think of) glaringly awful here.
Review by thebestbrian ½

Movie executives saw the success of the NBC primetime drama, This Is Us, and said "let's get that guy to make a movie!"
What followed is two hours of the baffling, mawkish, maudlin, and most importantly laughable Life Itself.
This movie has so many problems - what I will say is, this isn't on the actors. The performances from the main & supporting cast are actually quite good. The script is just so heavy-handed & ham-fisted you can't help but crack-up at every overly tragic & traumatic event that occurs.
Nothing feels realistic or relatable. Every single thing that occurs just feels like the writer fighting to make the lives of his own characters worse and worse so they seem like they're interesting people. It's the pathetic kind of creative writing that even an angsty teen would be embarrassed to share.
Avoid this at all costs unless you're a masochist like me.
Review by sater ½ 1

like a cross between stranger than fiction and crash, written by a 13 year old. a towering achievement of dumb shit. maybe i should watch “this is us”
Review by Ryan Simpkins ½ 2

Got back from the ER, turned on Life Itself, movie sucked.
Review by Erik Gleim

Pretty okay! Cloud Atlas caliber storytelling, if that says anything at all. For a movie about the unreliability of narration, it makes a lot of narrative choices “for us,” and ends up proposing a thesis anyway. Stories shouldn’t have to come out and tell you what they mean (or what they mean to mean, but you can choose for yourself what you take from it, etc etc). This movie ends up feeling more like a commercial than a story made up of a batch of characters that you care about and that grow and interweave...because they all end up being swept up by this sort of larger and more banal “message” or “lesson” that seems to say...go with the flow! Life is unpredictable! Good storytelling is like keeping a secret or tiptoeing around a secret. There’s no need to show your hand, unless it feels right. It didn’t work out here too well.
Review by alesssa ★½

the plot was okay but that ending.......... 😐
Review by Leo Costello ★½

I'm putting this into a sub-genre I'm going to start calling "pretentious cry bait mom melodramas", along with Collateral Beauty, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and The Book of Henry. Movies like this are so on-the-nose, corny, and predictable. They think they're being profound or philosophical when really they have about as much depth as a quasi-spiritual inspirational sign at Hobby Lobby like "Live Laugh Love." It's like one step up from a Hallmark or Lifetime movie.
This movie in particular has some interesting moments, but they rarely feel like they fit the whole of the film. It thinks it's a movie about everything, when ultimately it ends up being a movie about nothing. Just empty platitudes. It's a two…
Review by natalhe ★★★

ai, gente, eu gostei. tudo bem, né, gostar.
Review by CoupleofFilms ★★

Shame about the ending. This really was interesting up until then.
Review by mariam_anwar ★★★★★

so beautiful it made me cry and i’m an emotionless shit.