Blue Valentine is an intimate, shattering portrait of a disintegrating marriage. On the far side of a once-passionate romance, Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) are married with a young daughter. Hoping to save their marriage, they steal away to a theme hotel. We then encounter them years earlier, when they met and fell in love—full of life and hope. Moving fluidly between these two time periods, Blue Valentine unfolds like a cinematic duet whose refrain asks, where did their love go? Special Features include: Deleted Scenes Q&A Making Of Home Movies Director and Editor's Commentary Love blooms and dies at the same time in the delicate dance between Oscar nominees Ryan Gosling ( Half Nelson) and Michelle Williams ( Brokeback Mountain). Gosling's Dean, a high-school dropout, works for a New York moving company. While relocating a frail widower into a retirement home, he spots Cindy, a nursing student who's visiting her grandmother, but the film actually begins six years later. Married with a daughter, they live in rural Pennsylvania. Heavy drinker Dean's looks are fading, while Cindy still turns heads. In his elegantly constructed second feature, writer-director Derek Cianfrance pirouettes between past and present, with each scene commenting on the next (set to the bittersweet tones of Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear). The Dean of the early years pursues Cindy, who resists at first, but a spontaneous date ends with her tap dancing (badly) and him singing (not so badly). She leaves her domineering boyfriend (Mike Vogel) for this attentive stranger, leading to scenes of intimacy that are far more suggestive than pornographic--even if the MPAA briefly rated the film NC-17. Later, when the family dog goes missing, the cracks in their marriage intensify, so Dean arranges for a night of romance, which plays out like a negative image of their first date. If the two actors, who are very good, are meant to carry equal weight, Gosling has the more difficult task. It's harder to like the clingy, insecure Dean, who loves more intensely and less wisely, but that makes Gosling's the braver performance. -- Kathleen C. Fennessy