Metacritic reviews

Joy is not all joy. There is frustration and loss and tears along the way, but it is a triumphant film about the way humans can make the world better and how a baby’s cry can be a priceless gift.

It’s an extremely moving and deeply affecting drama about a woman’s persistence in the face of overwhelming odds.

It’s not a flashy movie, and the vintage aesthetic sometimes feels unnecessarily dour, but it makes for good storytelling that embraces both our past and present concerns at once. And sometimes it’s the unassuming movies that manage to sneak up on you.

At the very least, it manages to remind us of how miraculous the commitment of human ingenuity can be, when it comes to making a new life possible.

Neither the deficiencies of Thorne’s script nor the made-for-TV feeling of Taylor’s direction ever fully obscure the enduringly relevant principle they exist to serve: Science will always keep inching forward, but it’s society’s job to ensure that bringing life into this world is a happiness worth the heartache of living in it.

It’s the movie’s efforts to make this as digestible as possible for the audience through its light-hearted tone and simplistic dialogue that render it a movie you watch on Netflix with your parents and probably never think about again.

It’s a somewhat stagey reconstruction but an approachable and humane account of a great moment in scientific history.

Given the emotive subject matter, the film chooses to keep the potential mothers at arm’s length as characters, losing tear-jerking opportunities as a consequence.

This is one of those pictures where the actors outdo the conventional material they are given to work with.

Joy adopts the most basic possible template for its fluffy history lesson, but still has an impressive habit of joining all the wrong dots.