Metacritic reviews

A brave film simply for daring to portray a nightmare lurking in the minds of middle-aged workers, people who might fear a film that addresses their insecurities this bluntly.

At times, Soldini gets so wrapped up in his characters' suffering that the movie loses perspective; it's a little hard to sympathize when the couple's needs grow so great that they're forced to sell their boat.

For Soldini, even bleakness has a poetic side, and his imagery is occasionally breathtaking here -- never more so than in the film's final tableau, which elegantly connects a Renaissance fresco Elsa had been working on before the couple's fall from grace with a strikingly similar real-life image suggesting the possibility of a renaissance in their marriage.

In American movies, the iconic question usually is, can men and women be friends without the sex part getting in the way? Here it's, can a husband appreciate his wife as a woman? The movie's success in Italy is partly a matter of frustration: Women need their men to grow up.

At times "Days" seems more of a social commentary on the shrinking middle class than the will-they-or-won't-they-make-it story at the heart of the film.

An intelligent adult drama that's especially relevant in these harsh economic times.

Sometimes art imitates life; sometimes it is life. If the market gets any worse, Days and Clouds could kill realism outright.

Without grounding in specific causes-and-effects, the film is just another dreary wallow in self-pity.

It plays out more like a 12-step program than a human drama.