Popular reviews

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  Review by eely 🎄 ★★★★★ 2

  this movie is the stuff dreams are made of, and by dreams I mean specifically the dreams I have after taking benedryl that simultaneously feel more real than my actual life and make absolutely zero sense.

  the scene where adrienne shelly’s mom is “gardening” by aggressively shoving plastic flowers into the ground means so much to me. I can’t stop thinking about the scene where adrienne shelly goes to robert john burke’s house to return the giant wrench she stole from him and she completely zones out while he attempts to explain the mechanics of an automatic transmission and then she responds by quietly asking him to make love to her.

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  Review by J Winston ★★★★★ 1

  "Audry, the world is not gonna come to an end when there are so many people making so much money."

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  Review by Sean Fennessey 4

  I hope Hal Hartley is well. I really liked his particular strain of overread, underfed Long Island poetry. Stilted by nature, yearning by necessity. All of his films make me feel better about where I come from, none more than this.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 5

  I smiled wide when the overweight, mediocre mechanic pulls out that electric guitar and amateurishly shreds a bit. Partly because I was reminded of a similar non sequitur in Simple Men, but mostly because I think I finally got why it's there. Hartley is simply depicting a pretty perfect example of smalltown America, which is littered with would-be rockstars practicing in odd spots for no reason, quietly observed by smarter, cooler, or wiser heads, but tolerated all the same. This mechanic is repeated a dozen times over in my hometown, and probably in every other part of America.

  This is a film about presumption, about smalltown rumors, about appearances, and about atonement. It has the beautiful tone/mood that Hartley had…

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  Review by Catharina ★★★★½ 4

  — Seems like a nice man.
  — You think so? I mean, after he's killed your sister and your father?
  — Things happen. People make mistakes.

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  Review by phoebe 💫 ★★★★ 1

  no eat no sleep just hal hartley movies where adrienne shelly falls in love with a morally gray potentially psychotic hot older man

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½ 9

  As archly literate as any of the coming storm of Gen-X indie breakouts, but grounded in an interest in the characters' realities and perspectives that is generally absent in, say, Tarantino or Whit Stillman or all but the best Linklater. In its mix of nihilistic black comedy and keening, existential longing on the outskirts of rotting American cities is a bafflingly logical midpoint between Repo Man and Paris, Texas, and the actors find great reservoirs of meaning and honest beneath the surface of what could have been merely clever dialogue. Among other things, I don't know that I've ever come a piece of art in any medium that so simply yet accurately explains the appeal of the "bad boy," particularly in this sort of context: in a dead-end town where no one seems to have a future, there's something intoxicating about someone who at least so visibly has a past.

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  Review by eely 🎄 ★★★★★

  you’ll read the play I’m in where I play the flirt and I’ll sleep with your crescent wrench every single night and we’ll live happily ever after until the bombs drop 💣

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  Review by Amy Hensarling ★★★½ 10

  “I’m not mixed up, I’m depressed!”

  Always a good sign when a movie starts with a hitchhiker. A man dressed in black carries a black case, red pack of Marlboros in his pocket, Scotch tape on his right shoe. He needs new shoes. Says he’s a mechanic. A mechanic.

  MEANWHILE

  A senior named Audrey is reading THE END OF THE WORLD by NED RIFLE and has a thing for George Washington. You know, the first president. He was a farmer. Maybe if he were running the country, society wouldn’t be doomed.

  Hal Hartley dialogue is so viscerally pleasing to me, so tactile refreshing I can’t adequately describe its sensation. I crave the sensational, extreme level of verbal clarity. Music to my ears.…

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  Review by KYK ★★★★

  (book of) revelation/revelatory, though according to hal, “a moral response to reality without being religious.” watched this kind of recently but i’m starting to become more of a hal gal...

  35mm. Metrograph.

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★

  “The last time I took a drink, I got into a car crash and I killed a girl.”

  “That's enough to drive you to drink.”

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  Review by Carlos Valladares ★★★★★

  I love being unable to keep up with a filmmaker’s bizarre track of mind—Hartley keeps me on my toes, and his film baffles my attempt to describe its aiming for a non-cloying eternity while it is only immediately concerned with looping inanities (Harold Pinter if he did casual screwballs) between mass murdering priests and frizzy-haired waitresses who are suspicious of artiste-men claiming to be photographers (the heart of everywhere, from Long Island to Seoul). I nearly died of laughter at the dialogue about washing your back when you have a new girlfriend: “Who the hell thinks about it anyway. Girls do, I guess I suppose it must get kinda dirty down there. With all that sweat ‘n’ everything. But you never see the goddamn thing. Underwear. Suddenly I'm buying underwear.” No line reading is safe from his tripwire antics—chaotic and cosmic.