Metacritic reviews

Under Johnson’s patient, observant direction, a relationship that might sound ridiculous on paper lives and breathes with surprising tenderness and plausibility onscreen.

Ms. Johnson and the screenwriter, Mark Jude Poirier, have transformed a taciturn masterpiece into an absorbing, messy, modest story of damaged relationships.

The film’s beauty lies in its carefully observed details and the larger story’s got nowhere particularly surprising to go.

Working off what appears to be a pretty decent script by Mark Poirier, who does a good job of juggling quite a few story threads and giving each enough attention and depth, Johnson's rigorous and formal approach doesn't allow for any sparks, let alone fireworks.

Hateship Loveship is unimpressive as a whole, but it’s stitched together with small, memorable touches.

Johnson doesn't seem to trust her star to unclench and act... In contrast, the rest of the cast, down to the gossipy local bank teller (Christine Lahti), feels electrically human.

The supporting cast includes Nick Nolte, Christine Lahti, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Hailee Steinfeld, making the movie’s greatest accomplishment the fact that it was able to squander so many interesting actors.

This particular character is so thinly written, and so aggressively nondescript, that it’s just a terrible fit for her(Wiig), resulting in a preposterous wish-fulfillment fantasy with an enormous void at its center.

For most of its length, in fact, the film seems to boil beneath its quiet surface like a Munro tale, and indeed like Joanna herself. Wiig carries this apparently unresolved tension in physical form: a wonderfully mannered performance of short steps and furious scrubbing and standing defensively behind chairs.

It ultimately offers little more than another opportunity for famous actors to indulge their fetishistic, inadvertently condescending impressions of "everyday" people.