Ernest Hardy
Movies reviews only
Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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The Watermelon Woman (1996) |
What could have been dry and didactic hums with humor, wit and laser-sharp insight. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Jan 22, 2022
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Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom (2008) |
Polk's heavy-handed political sloganeering is lifted straight from pamphlets, while his character development and plotting are clumsy and filled with holes. The ensemble acting is, putting it kindly, wildly uneven. - Village Voice
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| Posted May 22, 2020
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Strike a Pose (2016) |
Unexpectedly moving. - CraveOnline
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| Posted Feb 07, 2017
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Stuff (2015) |
The cast knocks the script out of the park, but Guacci also deserves kudos for casting Yvonne Jung as Deb. - CraveOnline
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| Posted Nov 15, 2016
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Jason and Shirley (2015) |
Mercifully, it's never too pedantic (it skirts close a few times) and is often quite funny - as when she gets in digs at Andy Warhol. But the film never really gets at the hostilities lobbed at Jason. - CraveOnline
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| Posted Nov 15, 2016
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In the Grayscale (2015) |
Uses tropes familiar from queer and hetero films alike: an uninhibited, unconventional, pot smoking wild child slowly liberates the uptight, straight-laced, teetotaling object of affection. - CraveOnline
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| Posted Nov 15, 2016
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The Amina Profile (2015) |
It's a gripping film, even with the knowledge of how it ends. - CraveOnline
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| Posted Nov 15, 2016
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Beautiful Something (2015) |
Graham pulls off a nimble hat-trick, fusing throwback, unapologetic queerness (frank sexuality; a world of tricks, one-night stands, and no moralizing about any of it) and unbridled romanticism. - CraveOnline
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| Posted Nov 15, 2016
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How to Cheat (2010) |
It's not groundbreaking stuff, but the ample time spent on the husband's pain and frustration creates an unexpectedly complex portrait of an ordinary, often annoying man trying to avoid being crushed by the upheavals in his ordinary life. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Nov 07, 2016
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Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home (2010) |
The film Napper has delivered adds necessary layers to a conversation that is only becoming more urgent as the gap between L.A.'s have and have-nots widens at a frightening pace. - Village Voice
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| Posted Aug 31, 2016
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Someone Else (2015) |
A tense, unexpectedly moving psychological study of a man's unraveling that initially seems a much simpler tale. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 10, 2016
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Hockney (2014) |
The documentary isn't intellectually rigorous or academically minded, but it is engrossing, buoyed by the charm of Hockney and his cohorts. - CraveOnline
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| Posted Apr 26, 2016
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Love Thy Nature (2014) |
Though the heavy-handed score is emotionally manipulative, Rokab alternates between hopeful and grim prognoses, mercifully providing a measure of hope and possibility that many films of this ilk do not. - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 19, 2016
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Sold (2014) |
Such a solid example of film-industry liberalism's shortcomings that it warrants only the faintest praise. - Village Voice
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| Posted Mar 29, 2016
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Of Mind and Music (2014) |
The whole thing is held together by performances that are superb across the board, Adams' assured direction and delicate, beautiful work by both director of photography Tom Lembcke and composer Carlos Jos Alvarez. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Mar 01, 2016
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1982 (2013) |
1982 is a ham-fisted morality tale about love, marriage and the fallout of the '80s crack epidemic as though told by someone whose intel on all three came primarily from pulp sources. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Feb 25, 2016
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The Fourth Noble Truth (2015) |
Because the film is centered on fully fleshed-out characters - flaws, weaknesses and all - it works in the same way any good religious emissary does: weaving a captivating tale to get the spiritual message across. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Feb 25, 2016
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Seahorses (2007) |
Here's a character- and dialogue-driven drama in which the characters are stock and the dialogue creaky. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Feb 25, 2016
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Forever (2015) |
The film twists tension in the viewer's gut as the clock ticks toward a day of reckoning. But the script could be tougher-minded, especially when a love-saves-the-day coda adds sugar to what would have been more powerful left bitter. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Jan 14, 2016
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Dream/Killer (2015) |
The fact that viewers, like the Fergusons, can muster only bittersweet relief at Ryan's release from prison is the film's whole point: The legal system itself is so damningly captured. - Village Voice
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| Posted Dec 01, 2015
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Frame by Frame (2015) |
Informative, revelatory, and full of astonishing photography. - Village Voice
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| Posted Nov 17, 2015
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Ayanda and the Mechanic (2015) |
The film has the urgency and magnetism of an assured youth-culture manifesto, only stumbling a bit when the balance between dramatic and comic elements leans too heavily toward the former. - Village Voice
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| Posted Nov 10, 2015
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Heneral Luna (2015) |
A hagiographic, testosterone-driven war film heavy on macho posturing, gunfire and explosions, bodies falling, and a stoic hero at the center of it all. - Village Voice
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| Posted Oct 27, 2015
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Tab Hunter Confidential (2015) |
The Tab Hunter of today, as shown in the numerous segments where he is interviewed about his life and career, is the epitome of effortless cool, deserving of his hard won respect. - CraveOnline
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| Posted Sep 29, 2015
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Forgotten (2014) |
Captures the visceral terror of torture so powerfully that it jars the viewer. - Village Voice
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| Posted Sep 17, 2015
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Songs From the North (2014) |
The fact that Yoo isn't regarded as an outsider by the people she's recording allows her to capture a number of revealing, unrehearsed moments that startle in their raw emotion. - Village Voice
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| Posted Sep 15, 2015
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The Man Who Saved the World (2014) |
Petrov is such a potent figure that he survives the heavy-handedness, but he is in some ways best served by Sergey Shnyryov's fantastic rendering of him in flashback. - Village Voice
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| Posted Sep 15, 2015
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Prophet's Prey (2015) |
Grim but riveting viewing, a layered commentary on this country's moral and spiritual underbelly. - Village Voice
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| Posted Sep 15, 2015
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My Voice, My Life (2014) |
Damn if a few of the kids don't milk your tear ducts at the end. - Village Voice
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| Posted Aug 25, 2015
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People, Places, Things (2015) |
There are two reasons to check out People Places Things - but neither the lead actors nor the characters they play are among them. - Village Voice
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| Posted Aug 14, 2015
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The Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez (2012) |
It gives film fans the chance to see the late Ernest Borgnine in his last acting gig and to see that he clearly relished every opportunity to perform. Unfortunately, the film surrounding him is a pulseless homage to spaghetti westerns. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Jun 25, 2015
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Glass Chin (2014) |
Buschel's script is peppered with both offbeat humor and philosophical debates that circle back to what is, at heart, a class critique that skewers everything from the art world to the bougie dreams of the common man. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jun 23, 2015
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Preggoland (2014) |
There's satiric comedy to be mined from the conflicting messages society still sends about pregnancy, motherhood, and women's worth, but the script isn't smart enough to explore them. - Village Voice
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| Posted May 05, 2015
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Marfa Girl (2012) |
Oddly compelling. - CraveOnline
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| Posted May 04, 2015
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Soul Boys of the Western World (2014) |
It helps to be a Spandau fan, of course, but the smart, layered contextualizing and historicizing of the group within the film makes it a gift for any pop-culture aficionado. - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 28, 2015
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Candlestick (2014) |
Presswell's stylized dialogue, whose rapid-fire banter often hardens into self-conscious artifice, is biting and witty but thankfully absent either endless pop-culture references or cloying self-consciousness of its own cleverness. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Apr 22, 2015
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Revolution (2012) |
Revolution is educational, but its shortcomings are glaring. - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 22, 2015
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Song From the Forest (2014) |
Song is filled with great beauty and moments of everyday life that show that director Michael Obert has a fine sense of the power of the quotidian ... - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 07, 2015
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The Girl Is in Trouble (2012) |
The film's visually arresting, but it's the performances that hold it all together - Short, Wilmer Valderrama, Jesse Spencer, Paz de la Huerta, Mriam Coln, and Mike Starr, with Bachleda being the real glue. - Village Voice
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| Posted Mar 31, 2015
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Death of a Tree (2015) |
Every conversation is a heavy-handed meditation on guilt and redemption, with language lifted directly from religious tracts and not even slightly molded into the way actual human beings talk to one another. - Village Voice
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| Posted Mar 31, 2015
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Electric Slide (2014) |
Jim Sturgess as Dodson is meant to be a charismatic, effete dandy. He merely comes off creepy. Vinessa Shaw, Chlo Sevigny, and Patricia Arquette are utterly wasted in nothing parts. - Village Voice
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| Posted Mar 31, 2015
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Walter (2015) |
Feels something like gathering a team of master chefs to make a breakfast of corn flakes and Tang. - Village Voice
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| Posted Mar 10, 2015
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The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest (2014) |
A chilling, timely, often darkly and unexpectedly humorous look at one man's brutal experiences in the American prison system, the documentary The Mind of Mark DeFriest is the adage "truth is stranger than fiction" writ large. - Village Voice
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| Posted Mar 03, 2015
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The Business of Disease (2014) |
Weakened by a frequently overwrought score and cheap graphics that often give Business something of a histrionic undertone. - Village Voice
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| Posted Feb 17, 2015
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The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid (2014) |
Rossier allows space for the man's culpability even as he convincingly shows that without de Klerk's involvement, the struggle for black liberation would have been much harder and taken much longer. - Village Voice
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| Posted Feb 03, 2015
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Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter (2014) |
You need not be a student or scholar of dance to be completely enthralled by Greg Vander Veer's documentary Miss Hill. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jan 21, 2015
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Americons (2015) |
Americons has its heart and justifiably outraged politics in the right place; it just lacks artistry or real insight. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jan 21, 2015
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Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border (2013) |
Reyes brings a smart visual artist's compositional eye to capturing the people and environment on the Mexican side of the divide. - Village Voice
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| Posted Dec 22, 2014
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Playing (and looking) like a home movie that has been tricked out with digestible scientific content, the film is also incredibly moving. - Village Voice
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| Posted Dec 10, 2014
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Giuseppe Makes a Movie (2014) |
Andrews isn't the first creative type to attempt to cast ineptitude as a virtue, but damn if he doesn't just about make his case in Giuseppe Makes a Movie. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Nov 11, 2014
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