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Ernest Hardy

Ernest Hardy

Tomatometer-approved critic

Movies reviews only

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Rating T-Meter Title | Year Review
92%
The Watermelon Woman (1996) What could have been dry and didactic hums with humor, wit and laser-sharp insight. - L.A. Weekly
Read More | Posted Jan 22, 2022
42%
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
Read More | Posted May 22, 2020
96%
Strike a Pose (2016) Unexpectedly moving. - CraveOnline
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Nov 15, 2016
88%
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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Nov 15, 2016
89%
The Amina Profile (2015) It's a gripping film, even with the knowledge of how it ends. - CraveOnline
Read More | Posted Nov 15, 2016
50%
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
Read More | Posted Nov 15, 2016
80%
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
Read More | Posted Nov 07, 2016
100%
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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted May 10, 2016
85%
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
Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2016
30%
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
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2016
56%
Sold (2014) Such a solid example of film-industry liberalism's shortcomings that it warrants only the faintest praise. - Village Voice
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2016
71%
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
Read More | Posted Mar 01, 2016
78%
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
Read More | Posted Feb 25, 2016
83%
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
Read More | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Dec 01, 2015
93%
Frame by Frame (2015) Informative, revelatory, and full of astonishing photography. - Village Voice
Read More | Posted Nov 17, 2015
86%
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
Read More | Posted Nov 10, 2015
78%
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
Read More | Posted Oct 27, 2015
87%
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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Sep 17, 2015
100%
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
Read More | Posted Sep 15, 2015
68%
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
Read More | Posted Sep 15, 2015
93%
Prophet's Prey (2015) Grim but riveting viewing, a layered commentary on this country's moral and spiritual underbelly. - Village Voice
Read More | Posted Sep 15, 2015
86%
My Voice, My Life (2014) Damn if a few of the kids don't milk your tear ducts at the end. - Village Voice
Read More | Posted Aug 25, 2015
77%
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
Read More | Posted Aug 14, 2015
40%
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
Read More | Posted Jun 25, 2015
85%
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
Read More | Posted Jun 23, 2015
47%
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
Read More | Posted May 05, 2015
27%
Marfa Girl (2012) Oddly compelling. - CraveOnline
Read More | Posted May 04, 2015
71%
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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Apr 22, 2015
67%
Revolution (2012) Revolution is educational, but its shortcomings are glaring. - Village Voice
Read More | Posted Apr 22, 2015
100%
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
Read More | Posted Apr 07, 2015
61%
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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Mar 31, 2015
14%
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
Read More | Posted Mar 31, 2015
54%
Walter (2015) Feels something like gathering a team of master chefs to make a breakfast of corn flakes and Tang. - Village Voice
Read More | Posted Mar 10, 2015
91%
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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Feb 17, 2015
50%
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
Read More | 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
Read More | Posted Jan 21, 2015
17%
Americons (2015) Americons has its heart and justifiably outraged politics in the right place; it just lacks artistry or real insight. - Village Voice
Read More | Posted Jan 21, 2015
100%
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
Read More | Posted Dec 22, 2014
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(undefined) Playing (and looking) like a home movie that has been tricked out with digestible scientific content, the film is also incredibly moving. - Village Voice
Read More | Posted Dec 10, 2014
100%
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
Read More | Posted Nov 11, 2014
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