On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 78% of 156 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh's palpable chemistry will snatch audiences' hearts before breaking them in We Live in Time, a powerful melodrama that uses its nonlinear structure to thoughtfully explore grief." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 58 out of 100, based on 38 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences surveyed by PostTrak gave the film an 83% overall positive score, with 63% saying they would definitely recommend it. Benjamin Lee, for The Guardian, gave the film 4 stars out of 5 and wrote, "I found its throwback nature to be immensely charming, a big, full-throated romantic drama that knows exactly how to make us swoon as well as make us sad. I hope there’s time for more like it." In her review for The New York Times, Manolha Dargis praised the character of Almut, and Pugh's performance but found the film only "trie[d] to be modern". Brianna Zigler, writing for The A.V. Club, called the film "unimaginative and weirdly regressive," and opined that Garfield and Pugh, while "likable and sweet" were also "thin" and "boring", and were not convincing in their depiction of their characters' relationship. Zigler also did not think Almut's decisions regarding her cancer and motherhood were plausible. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com, who gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, said that Pugh and Garfield elevated what was otherwise a shallow script, and singled out Garfield in particular as the standout performance. On the nonlinear narrative, Tallerico thought that while appearing to be random at first glance, it exhibited "an emotional logic" upon a closer examination, in a way that evoked the way a person may remember key moments in their life as it comes to an end. Tallerico was uncertain if there were not too many time jumps, commenting, "The chronological jumble will be a dealbreaker for some people who like their weepers straightforward", but speculated that the challenge in making this structure work is what attracted the actors to the project in the first place. Reviewing the film for Variety, Peter Debrugge thought the sequences in which the scenes were laid out was arbitary, and in a way that made mapping out nonlinear narrative difficult. Debrugge wondered if there was a "way to unscramble" the film.[32] Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Times had a similar appraisal of the sequencing of the scenes, which he felt did not elevate the film's concept. While Whipp praised Pugh and Garfield, he felt that the film's execution of the non-linear structure distanced the audience from the two performers, rendering Almut and Tobias as concepts rather than characters.