Critic Reviews

[Swanberg's] latest work, All the Light in the Sky, displays a striking new willingness to meet his audience halfway, buttressing his signature style with clever pacing, solid technique and a deeply soulful lead performance from co-scripter Jane Adams.

Large-scale anxieties about the future of the environment mingle with the characters’ small-scale anxieties about the present. The effect of this interplay will probably vary from viewer to viewer. As with Swanberg’s production methods, a lot depends on what you bring to the movie.

A minor effort in a filmography largely composed of them, All the Light in the Sky is nonetheless satisfying on the terms it establishes early on.

The cosmic and the microscopic are casually — and delicately — juxtaposed in All the Light in the Sky, an evocative, slightly melancholic movie.

Where the film excels is in capturing the quiet revelations in Marie's life over the few days it chronicles — revelations that represent the aftermath of choices made years before, when expectations were higher.

All The Light In The Sky is a refreshingly grown-up exploration of a woman at a personal and professional crossroads that’s stronger for never pushing its narrative or its finely wrought lead character in the direction of big moments or bullshit epiphanies. It’s casual, but also quietly moving.

Marie is middle-aged and at a crossroads in All the Light in the Sky, a movie that feels the same way — listless and searching and on its way toward something good.

In Joe Swanberg's disaffected little film, the drama is never explicit, or even fully conscious.

[A] tediously naturalistic and fairly pointless no-budget indie about the compromises of middle-aged femininity.