Movie · 2024 · Romance, Drama · 1h 48m · R · English
Curator score: 3.8/10 (70.9K ratings)
Every minute counts.
Overview
An up-and-coming chef and a recent divorcée find their lives forever changed when a chance encounter brings them together, in a decade-spanning, deeply moving romance.
Ratings
Curator score: 3.8/10
IMDb: 7.0/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 79%
Metacritic: 59
TMDB: 7.2/10
Director
John Crowley
Production
Film4 Productions, SunnyMarch, Shoebox Films, StudioCanal UK
Cast
Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh, Grace Delaney, Lee Braithwaite, Aoife Hinds, Adam James, Douglas Hodge, Amy Morgan, Niamh Cusack, Lucy Briers, Robert Boulter, Nikhil Parmar, Kerry Godliman, Heather Craney, Matt Kennard, Sam Kennard, Saroja-Lily Ratnavel, Laura Guest, Marama Corlett, Sue Wallace
Where to watch
Max
Curator Review
Verdict
A tender, high-gloss romance with strong chemistry and a melancholy sense of time passing, but it leans heavily on familiar tearjerker beats and a somewhat calculated emotional structure. The performances and domestic details do a lot of the work, making it rewarding for viewers who want a polished, bittersweet love story.
Best for
romance fans who like emotional melodrama
viewers drawn to star-driven chemistry
audiences who enjoy nonlinear, memory-framed storytelling
people looking for a modern tearjerker with a hopeful streak
Skip if
you want subtle, low-key realism
you dislike sentimental romance
you prefer tightly plotted dramas over mood and feeling
you are tired of illness-and-loss romance arcs
Overview
We Live in Time is built around the kind of romance that wants to be remembered in fragments: first meetings, domestic rituals, small jokes, and the looming awareness that time is always slipping away. John Crowley stages it with a soft, polished touch, and the film’s greatest asset is the easy, lived-in chemistry between its leads, which makes the relationship feel immediate even when the structure is deliberately elliptical.
Worth noting
The movie works best when it settles into everyday intimacy, especially the kitchen and home-life details that give the romance texture. It is less convincing when it reaches for bigger emotional punctuation, where the screenplay can feel engineered to wring tears rather than discover them.
Bottom line
Still, for viewers open to a sincere, glossy, bittersweet love story, it lands. It is not especially original in its emotional architecture, but it is persuasive in performance and tone, and it understands how ordinary moments can become the ones that matter most.
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Cooking with Flo except I cry uncontrollably the whole time