Untogether

With terrific pacing, knockout script, and actors who know what to do with it, Untogether quickly earned its place in the subgenre of romance worth watching.

The film's emotional intelligence gets it past the occasional false note, and the strength of its central performances keeps us engaged even when the characters themselves might not deserve our sympathy.

Despite being well shot, confidently written, and acted with a surfeit of commitment by most of its cast (Mendelsohn, who not for the first time reminded me uncomfortably of Trivago pitchman Tim Williams, is director Forrest’s ex-husband), I found the world it presented both smugly insular and overfamiliar.

Watching Untogether, it’s easy to wish Forrest had elected to focus exclusively on Andrea and leave Tara as a background supporting character.

A hodgepodge of relationship movie clichés occasionally redeemed by a game cast.

There’s scarcely a behavior or line reading in this exasperating relationship drama that doesn’t feel like affectation. Fraudulence might be a plot point, but only the writer and director, Emma Forrest, knows why it has to permeate the entire movie.

Another anemic and pointless stringing together of stories that are not worth telling, Untogether follows the truncated lives of a group of lost souls in Los Angeles with an overdose of paralyzing cinematic anesthesia.