It's OK, I suppose, and quite sweet. But I couldn't love it for proper, probably because its characters are always more interested in themselves than we are in them, plus it's just too self-consciously tricksy.

... at its core, Beginners is about finding happiness, even at the end.

Mike Mills treats love and loss with a disarming tenderness and a refusal of sentimentality that make Beginners, his second feature, something of an anomaly among male identity flicks. What a finely wrought, wryly funny, transcendently sad movie this is.

I wish [Mike] Mills had dug even deeper. I found Beginners charming, but not as moving as I expected. Still, I would recommend this delicately directed film.