Metacritic reviews

It’s a good sign for the intelligence of your science fiction movie, when it’s easy to imagine the story working as a stage play with just two actors.

Estes finds a way to twist things up, organically adding a Groundhog Day element. Time's still moving forward toward Ashley's death, but the detective work gets more interesting.

Estes handily pumps up the tension, and keeps the story moving along at a brisk pace. There may be nothing particularly memorable about the filmmaking on display, but Relive is focused mostly on its actors.

Despite its trappings, Relive is a family drama with a slight supernatural twist, and had Estes explored that, perhaps the film would feel more whole. Instead, Relive winds up being a thriller without any actual thrills.

But it’s as much fun as a dumb time-travel murder mystery/cop thriller has any right to be. Just don’t let it keep you up at night sorting through it all, again, the way the folks who take notes (critics) have to. It’ll spoil it.

The plot is ingeniously engineered, but the narrative is like a low-res image. It gets the idea across, but without the kind of details that make it memorable.

With any luck, Relive will get a reboot down the road, in which someone takes better advantage of the basic idea.

What keeps Don’t Let Go watchable is, ironically, its predictability: the cop-movie clichés, the shootouts, the mishandled evidence, the bargain-bin twists.

Don’t Let Go manages, at times, to generate a nicely weird “Twilight Zone” vibe, but fails to sustain it, as it also runs into some of the same problems that plague movies of this ilk: If you tear the fabric of time by altering what has already happened, it can be difficult to sew it back up straight.

The problem is Estes’ script. There are some real clunkers twisting around in the dialogue, and this viewer was way ahead of its big twists (and I never figure out big twists).