I saw this at TIFF 2014 where it seemed to be received pretty positively.
Kudos to those involved with casting as every actor/actress, from the leading Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon, right down to those who were only in one or two scenes, did a really good job. There were a lot of confrontational emotions in this movie and the actors/actresses did a great job of getting me to empathize with their characters. I had a hard time believing that Laura Dern's young-looking character was Garfield's character's mother, but she acted well.
I felt that Bahrani struck a good balance between showing the audience Garfield's character's life with his family VS his professional life.
I found the music throughout the movie to be pretty appropriate. The music chosen for each scene complimented the dramatic tone of what was happening.
There were two things about the movie that bothered me enough to pull me out of the tense drama temporarily: (1) There were a couple of big coincidental moments (one of which is directly related to the final scene) that seemed a bit too fate-like. For a movie with the very real backdrop of the US housing market crash, and such believable characters, these unrealistic occurrences seemed out of place. (2) At one point, a montage format is used to quickly show Garfield's character go through a bunch of different exchanges with other characters. This quick cutting from scenario to scenario is a missed opportunity to fully immerse us viewers in a couple of heart-wrenching moments. As a result, the mixed emotions that I recognized I was supposed to feel weren't as strong as they could have been.
Overall, this drama was well done. I think it could have been better in some areas, but it was still a nice watch.
