Popular reviews

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★½

  The crux of the plot is completely ludicrous, yet in a strange roundabout way it allows Eastwood to explore so many of his core interests, including death and grief as implied by the plot. I have very little to say about this one actually - what sticks with me the most is how much this film really consists of "little" moments - nothing really happens in this movie, but there are real moments of beauty throughout - like Damon (whose ability to underplay his parts makes him an ideal collaborator for Eastwood) and Bryce Dallas Howard meeting each other at cooking school, flirting and slowly getting to know each other. Moments like these are some of the hardest to get…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★ 2

  i enjoy the overall pragmatism here. there's no push for belief, rather a characteristic lack of portent from Eastwood, who clearly has much less interest in the supernatural than he does in simply observing this assortment of lonely hearts.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  Far more interested in life than the after life which might explain some of the misconceptions. Like a lot of the Eastwood's movies, death hangs over the action, Morgan's script considerations about after life and spirits are more a vehicle from the movie to deal with going on through trauma and emptiness. The supernatural material is intriguing by how straightforward it is deal with, the movie just treat as a given that Damon's has a gift and that there's ghosts around, so everything is seem as very plain; that everyone is not alone, but is looked upon just makes their loneliness more felt and Damon knowledge of that helps turn him into one of Eastwood typical ghosts characters. This is…

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  Review by Jacob ★★★ 7

  “One cell. One person. Always.”

  I feel that I’m in the group of people who hate this film and finds it a complete bore but I also feel that I’m rating it lower than I what I really want because there are moments, very brief moments that lingered with me as I’m writing this, moments that tugged at my heartstrings. 

  I remember renting this film a long time ago and fell asleep after the Roland Emmerich beginning (a tsunami of terrible special effects showcasing a… tsunami) and never gave it a shot afterwards. The below average reviews and absolutely no one has ever mentioned this film to me. EVER. So, I love Matt Damon, easily one of my favorite actors…

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  Review by elizabeth 🌈 ★★★★★ 6

  Eastwood's AI

  An old man makes a film about death --though make no mistake, this is a film about life first and foremost -- by looking at the youth, endless, sublime poetry emerges. Frankly this has everything I love about Eastwood's cinema: a tenderness for humanity that seems so cosmic and is so deeply moving, a fascination with the way people operate and feel and how they navigate themselves through their lives and an appreciation for the quiet way of living that I treasure deeply. All Clint does here is film the most simple of scenes with the most simple of characters, compose the most simple of scores yet it all feels so grand and touching. This is such a…

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  Review by Austin Gorski ★★★

  I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but it had some issues. Firstly, the film got pretty boring as I only found Damon's story to be engaging. The french lady's and the kids stories were uneventful and how their stories all meet up in the end is soo contrived that it actually hurt to watch.

  But like I said, it's better than I thought it was going to be. I was expecting to full-blown hate this, but the performances, especially from Damon and Howard, along with the nice cinematography, save the film when it's all said and done.

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  Review by chavel ★★

  Sodden and drowsy, as well as clumpy and slack in its editing – and it goes on interminably. Clint Eastwood had made three criminally underappreciated films in a row (“Invictus,” “Gran Torino,” “Changeling”) but in 2010 he had uncharacteristically unspooled an amorphous blemish called Hereafter from a screenplay by Peter Morgan (his previous "Frost/Nixon" script was an unmitigated success). In the least, short-stack hunk Matt Damon does committed work in the understated role of a San Francisco forklift operator named George who has psychic gifts, that are of course to him a curse. This runs concurrent to two other storylines of varying interest until there is a final act overlap. The expensive set pieces include a shoreline city submerged by…

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  Review by Shea Gallagher ★★★★½

  Haunted by loss but also inching towards something to reach out and hold close. To lose and to keep on searching is to be human, to find is to truly live. Slips into a tender twilight and drifts gently along its own special wavelength, so lonely and yet so hopeful. That Clint in his old age made a work imbued with such curiosity and patience (on both thematic and formal levels) is why we should be very grateful to have him still with us. A film to be treasured.

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  Review by Augie 2

  it feels like a part of me was missing, and now I have found it. this movie has immediately become important to my existence, my friends, and i'm not sure i'll ever be able to explain why or how, but I will try here and there. you know, there's a lot of talk in the 21st century cinema of "empathetic" filmmaking and empathy in the cinema---to me there are only a few truly empathetic filmmakers in the 21st century American cinema, two of them being Shyamalan and Eastwood. here Shyamalan is the obvious comparison; we have characters battling through their pain, their pain becomes their strength in a way, and the characters come together in order to help each other,…

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  Review by will ½ 2

  a tsunami hits thailand, but paris is fine.

  there are two films, hereafter and the tree of life, that have interesting parallels: both structure themselves around a traumatic event and the reconciliation there-of. one is steeped in mysticism, the other is in history. hereafter's mysticism therefore compels it to avoid history -- an ontological point declared, the beginning with an act of destruction. but we know why these places get destroyed, we know that acts of god are not really acts of god. we know too that within a certain time frame these beaches will be consumed by the oceans so that the wealthy will no longer have their luxury hotels built off of the labor of the people who…

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  Review by connor ★★★★½ 2

  really hope this gets duly re-evaluated with time, as it’s probably one of the most sincerely moving films ever made. so much pain & so much grace, all culminating in an act of transcendence, a lie for the sake of healing and a handshake without a haunting, all moving towards much-needed hope. 

  Matt & Bryce are both fantastic and i wanna give them each a big hug. but anyway, fine, y’all got me: Eastwood is good. 

  
  85/100

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  Review by russman ★★

  For someone who doesn't do psychic readings anymore, he sure does a lot of psychic readings