Roxie Theater: Blue Valentine

Employing a nonlinear narrative, Cianfrance’s bittersweet heartbreaker of a movie slides back and forth along a six-year timeline to review crucial points in the relationship of working-class couple Dean and Cindy (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, in marvelously committed performances), tracking the ups and downs that lay between their passionate, playful early courtship to their present fed-up dead-end dissolution, as they struggle to stay together for their daughter, Frankie. A riveting, rueful romance, sifting through the wreckage of lost love for a clue to what went wrong.

Part of our Broken Hearts Cinema Club series.