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Eric Hynes
Eric Hynes's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).
Publications:
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Little Fugitive (1953) |
Like childhood itself, it's over before you're ready to let it go. - Time Out
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| Posted Sep 16, 2021
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Mother (2019) |
As with many resonant works of narrative art, its extreme particularity has universal echoes. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jan 21, 2021
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Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020) |
It's in the film's non-dioramic elements, the observational and candid moments, that life is most urgently asserted. Yes, time is short. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Sep 15, 2020
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The Mole Agent (2020) |
The deadening/enlivening line that Alberdi walks here is something like that between surface twee and bone-deep pathos...but it's elevated through the buy-in of its subjects. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Sep 15, 2020
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Some Kind of Heaven (2020) |
I hazard to think that the film's mutual curiosity gives Some Kind of Heaven its vivifying spirit, that transforms what might have been familiarly charming and smirkily knowing into something more troubling, elusive, and enduring. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Sep 15, 2020
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Rollerball (1975) |
Jewison's extreme-sports future shock bundles together a paranoid political thriller, a McLuhan-drunk media satire, ultraviolent exploitation, reverent respect for faddish athletic pursuits and enough zoom shots to make Robert Altman blush. - Rolling Stone
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| Posted May 30, 2018
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) |
Tasked with the pivot film in a trilogy, Johnson chose the right time to reinvigorate the narrative with irreconcilable forces, doubts, and conflicts. Suspension is a middle chapter's best asset. And best in that it's truest. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Jan 11, 2018
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Loveless (2017) |
Loveless's most crucial images are either captured from the ground up, trees spinning against the sky, or left in rooms and cars recently abandoned, attentive to the sudden quiet and pushing through windows for a closer look. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jan 03, 2018
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The Work (2017) |
The theatricality of The Work is neither incidental nor detrimental-it's native to the process being documented. Every space is, or at least can be, a theatrical one. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Nov 02, 2017
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Che Guevara (2005) |
Problematic as portrait, the film fascinates as a mess of artistic choices - some bold, some easy, many good in theory if not in effect. - Stop Smiling
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| Posted Aug 24, 2017
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Summer Hours (2008) |
Avoiding easy conflict and histrionics, Summer Hours instead shows loving siblings, relatives and friends negotiating differences the best that they can. - Stop Smiling
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| Posted Aug 24, 2017
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Shuga (Chouga) (2007) |
An adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina transposed to contemporary Kazakhstan, Chouga is a masterful distillation of the great novel's characterizations and themes. - Stop Smiling
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| Posted Aug 23, 2017
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Tulpan (2008) |
From beginning to end, horizon to horizon, Dvortsevoy's film is simply a privilege to watch. - Stop Smiling
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| Posted Aug 23, 2017
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The Battle of Algiers (1966) |
It uses realism as an effect, documentary as a style. You feel that you're really there, and you can't help but be moved. - Village Voice
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| Posted Oct 05, 2016
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The Lost Arcade (2015) |
The fate of Chinatown Fair makes for a reasonably compelling, if familiar, story... [Yet] it's when the film wanders offsite that its true subject emerges. - Village Voice
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| Posted Aug 12, 2016
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Under the Sun (2015) |
Though there's something inherently satisfying about seeing propaganda de-pantsed, Mansky has something greater to offer than easy irony. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jul 08, 2016
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W. (2008) |
Not only does W. fail as both drama and comedy, it's unclear which sequences are meant to be which. - Stop Smiling
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| Posted Jun 14, 2016
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Allegiance (2012) |
A genre-savvy, ethically entangled military thriller by first-timer Michael Connors. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jun 07, 2016
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Maggie's Plan (2015) |
It's clear that Maggie's plan was ill-conceived from the start, and unfortunately Maggie's Plan proves ill-conceived through to the end. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted May 25, 2016
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Weiner (2016) |
The problem is that Weiner tells a fully expected story, leveraging laughs out of the politician's pre-mocked predicament, and shaping near-silent appearances by Abedin into a sympathy-courting foil. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted May 03, 2016
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Slumdog Millionaire (2008) |
A goofy picaresque to rival Forrest Gump, Slumdog Millionaire has a similar power to please, shell-gaming the audience into emotionally investing in and celebrating its protagonist's dumb romanticism. - Reverse Shot
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| Posted Feb 23, 2016
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) |
There are worse films than The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and those 15 masterful minutes may well justify the price of admission. But there's a lot of movie before and after Swinton's cameo. - Stop Smiling
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| Posted Dec 12, 2015
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In Jackson Heights (2015) |
Whether we're digging in, driving by, spending time with or merely glimpsing, going long or going short, there's not a frame of In Jackson Heights that isn't completely, fully, fascinatingly there. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 04, 2015
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Queen of Earth (2015) |
The film would be nothing but a hollow exercise if its hollowness weren't so hauntingly precise. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Sep 14, 2015
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The Tribe (2014) |
Slaboshpytskiy's gambit is to thrust us into the domain of the deaf by eliminating the spoken word and withholding subtitled translation for the flurried sign language, making this a truly and pointedly silent movie. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted May 07, 2015
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The Hunting Ground (2015) |
There's a dicey feeling of familiarity to Dick's new film, a sense of footage fitting into pre-existing slots ... Instead of putting a human face on appalling statistics, the faces are starting to look like just more quantifiable evidence - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Mar 06, 2015
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The Theory of Everything (2014) |
It's disappointing to see Hawking's life slotted into the conventions of the biopic genre, from a meet-cute at a Cambridge party to a centerstage ovation for our genius hero. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 06, 2014
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Love Is Strange (2014) |
Sachs doesn't subvert his tearjerker enterprise so much as soften and parcel out emotion, empathizing no more with the distraught couple than with their hosts, whose lives are no less inconvenienced, or interesting. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Aug 25, 2014
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Life Itself (2014) |
While the film is too candid about Ebert's ego, petulance, and late-career critical softening to be called hagiography, that very frankness does harmonize with the critic's own eleventh-hour turn toward full and fearless disclosure. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jul 07, 2014
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The Immigrant (2013) |
Few contemporary filmmakers have James Gray's ability or ambition to match exquisite craft with emotionally complex storytelling. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted May 09, 2014
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Cold in July (2014) |
Jim Mickle remains firmly ensconced in B territory with this pulp crime thriller...Mickle may be just playing with genre, but at least he approaches it with vitality, inventiveness, and pleasure. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted May 09, 2014
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Child's Pose (2013) |
While lacking the elegant formal conviction of the best Romanian New Wave films, Calin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose is nevertheless a work of sophisticated and affecting storytelling, persuasively enmeshing the fate of individuals with that of society. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Jan 14, 2014
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Grudge Match (2013) |
Even by low standards, Grudge Match is astonishingly undercooked. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 24, 2013
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The Selfish Giant (2013) |
It's the two young stars-one a whirlwind and the other a quiet protector-who make this only-slightly tall tale into something towering. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 18, 2013
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Tim's Vermeer (2013) |
Tim's finished Vermeer may resemble the real thing, but Tim's Vermeer never tackles the true mystery of why the latter is actually incomparable. - Time Out
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| Posted Dec 04, 2013
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The End of Time (2012) |
It leaves you without the net of linear temporality, frightened and freed by the implications. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 26, 2013
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Sandra (1965) |
Visconti's approach is both classical and modern, etching tableaus of gone-to-seed opulence in high-contrast black and white while incorporating handheld camerawork, zooms and idiosyncratically framed shots. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 19, 2013
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These Birds Walk (2013) |
Such callousness is refuted by Asad's battle-scarred empathy, old man Edhi's endurance, and the poetry of the film itself, which finds beauty not in poverty but in glimpses and gestures that transcend it. - Film Comment Magazine
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| Posted Nov 12, 2013
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Diamonds of the Night (1964) |
Nemec's debut stunner feels even more potent now that it's been freed of the expectations and delineations of a national movement. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 05, 2013
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The Wind Rises (2013) |
Even Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli wizardry can't ward off this story's jinxes. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 05, 2013
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Medora (2013) |
It's utterly impossible not to pull for these boys, or for a film that sees them as complex individuals rather than sociological evidence. - Time Out
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| Posted Nov 05, 2013
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Kill Your Darlings (2013) |
There's a heart here, but with all the superficial noise, it's hard to hear it beating. - Time Out
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| Posted Oct 15, 2013
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CBGB (2013) |
Mythologizing by way of whip-pans and slapstick spit-takes, CBGB just might be the CBGB that we deserve. - Time Out
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| Posted Oct 08, 2013
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Metallica: Through the Never (2013) |
It's all very handsomely arranged, but even with the concert footage, nothing ever feels live. - Slate
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| Posted Sep 26, 2013
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C.O.G. (2013) |
The ace in the hole is Groff, who fluidly slides between lip-curled sarcasm and teary-eyed vulnerability-he's the embodiment of the thrill and terror of being a not-so-little boy lost. - Time Out
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| Posted Sep 17, 2013
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Mother of George (2013) |
Working from a script by playwright Darci Picoult, Dosunmu fashions a tale that's realistic, melodramatic and culturally specific, yet unmistakably archetypal. - Time Out
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| Posted Sep 10, 2013
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La Maison de la radio (2013) |
Given only hints of personalities and the thinnest strands of stories, we're left with a hum of tinny snippets instead of anything that resembles the glorious noise of people putting on show after show after show. - Time Out
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| Posted Sep 03, 2013
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The Lifeguard (2013) |
As listless and self-regarding as its protagonist, flitting among underdeveloped characters and subplots and indulging in rote emo shots by the pool, yet never figuring out how to dive into the deep end. - Time Out
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| Posted Aug 27, 2013
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El estudiante (The Student) (2013) |
Argentine screenwriter turned director Santiago Mitre's drama thrusts us into a maelstrom of intrigue and a bewilderingly fractious debate without fear of losing us along the way. - Time Out
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| Posted Aug 21, 2013
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Old Cats (2010) |
The wild-eyed Celedn and stealthily empathetic Saavedra introduce a farcical element to this otherwise mournful milieu, but the tonal clashes yield something genuinely cathartic, if also ultimately irresolvable. - Time Out
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| Posted Aug 13, 2013
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