For 135 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 31% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 67% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Eric Hynes' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 53
Highest review score: 100 Little Fugitive (re-release)
Lowest review score: 20 To Age or Not to Age
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 29 out of 135
  2. Negative: 15 out of 135
135 movie reviews
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Eric Hynes
    There's influential, and then there's this 1953 microbudgeted beauty, one that's made its way into the DNA of everything from cinema vérité to the French New Wave.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Despite being the subject of nearly every shot in the film, Hoss maintains an air of mystery, simultaneously projecting severity, sensitivity and sensuousness throughout.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Jiro’s genius is godlike, but his personality is nonexistent; time is too-briskly spanned, then ground into blow-by-blow melodrama.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Mike Eley’s gorgeously saturated cinematography helps elevate the boys’ struggle into the realm of the heroic, but 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Fellag does for the film what his Lazhar does for the pupils: He's soothing and entrancingly enigmatic enough to keep us fixed to our seats.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Time and changing tides have been kind to Graceland (and to the local musicians who've since become internationally renowned), but an on-camera meeting between the songwriter and ANC leader Oliver Tambo finds their conflict between creative freedom and revolutionary solidarity fascinatingly unresolved.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    A train station finale is textbook tearjerker territory, but it still teems with exquisite sorrow.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Amid its celebrations of black power, ambitious Afros and fly female trombonists, the film serves as a rousing testament to the singular blessings of music education, since there's nothing inherent or automatic about kids learning how to groove.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Majewski's film is a dazzling master class in visual composition.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Poised between childhood and adolescence, arrogance and insecurity, the kids still make for compelling subjects.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    The film clandestinely captures marauders in action while embedding itself in the imperiled home of aging farmer Michael Campbell. He's not the movie's ad hoc martyr, but something more compelling: a simple man whose fight for personal justice has matured into patriotism.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Working from a script by playwright Darci Picoult, Dosunmu fashions a tale that’s realistic, melodramatic and culturally specific (we spend as much time ogling colorfully patterned dresses as we do admiring Gurira’s endlessly expressive face), yet unmistakably archetypal.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Undertow's three impassioned lead performances and Fuentes-León's honest engagement with thorny matters of identity, sexuality and community still make it an easy movie to get swept up by.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    The film ultimately plays less like an experiment than a demonstration of a tinkerer’s ingenuity. 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    This vision of contemporary Italy as a warped fairyland filled with corpulent slobs and seedy C-grade celebrities recalls the tough-love spectacle of Fellini’s "La Dolce Vita," but Reality frustratingly devolves into a far more tedious mass-media morality tale.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Essential, if artless, baseball exposé.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Point Blank fires nothing but blanks in the end, dealing in increasingly ludicrous plot twists and one fizzle of a finale.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Brazilian filmmaker Júlia Murat's first narrative feature is a mesmerizing, slow-build marvel.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Plays like a gothic prequel to David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method," one in which human flesh is viewed as both horrific and erotic terrain.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    The only time a subject directly addresses Takesue, it's with a doozy of a query: "Why are you taking my story to USA, New York?" The answer is as complex as the film itself, and as simple as deciding to not look away.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Miller’s ace in the hole is the hulking, regal Harper, whose round face vacillates between childlike mirth and lung-stomping sadness. His casual charisma not only commands our attention and affection, it sidelines every social or thematic concern to this singular, tentatively aspiring life.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    With tinkling thriller music and dramatic voiceover narration, this modest but engrossing first-person documentary comes on like a true crime caper.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    When it comes to human emotions, however, the filmmaker is all thumbs, crassly fumbling for audience response via clichéd uses of dropped-out sound and the occasional twinkling piano.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Attenberg shares with the Oscar-nominated "Dogtooth" a weakness for overgrown innocence and deadpan perversity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Characters seem less entrapped by their desires than by plot necessities — a fact that’s not redeemed by Ozon’s winking self-awareness.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    The Law is everything that this season’s lackluster blockbusters are not: a damn good time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    It's a sickening but stunning portrait of combat that looks past notions of bravery or brutality, guilt or innocence, to bear witness to a thoroughly besieged humanity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Director Madeleine Sackler favors an agenda of advocacy over complexity, making The Lottery an effective, if unapologetically one-sided, piece of agitprop.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    The backbeat anarchy is fun while it lasts, but without a persuasive purpose, it's all just noise in the end.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    What Lost Bohemia lacks in aesthetic presentation - first-time filmmaker Astor seems to have gathered footage without much forethought - is made up for by an intimacy familiar from home movies, revealing eccentric neighbors at their most frank and endearing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    This impassioned documentary could have the same real-world impact as Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line," and help to free a wrongly convicted man. The filmmaking could be better, but it's hard to argue with that kind of potential.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    What elevates The Sky Turns beyond a lovely little elegy and into the realm of greatness is Álvarez's refusal to shape the film as a tragedy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Armed with archival footage and wrenching interviews, filmmaker Chad Freidrichs revisits one of our nation's darkest hours - and emerges with a scrupulous, revelatory consideration of the varied factors that turned a worthy plan into a horrific, state-sanctioned nightmare for a generation of working-class African-Americans.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Though overly dependent on a roundelay of talking heads, the film escalates into an ace legal thriller, spinning a web of shame that snags everything from the Austrian government to America's most beloved not-for-profits.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    It’s a film defined by momentum, by the spectacle of an unformed young man rapidly becoming someone.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Boy
    Boy needn't be pop-culturally fluent to be relatable; believable human characterizations would have sufficed.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Unlike satires that coast on winking self-satisfaction, Anusha Rizvi's debut is both a heartfelt and a genuinely funny skewering of India's convoluted caste-consciousness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    What elevates the film is a pervasive, palpable sense of loss — between lover and beloved, young and old, stage and screen.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    There's some magic in the grab-bag method, but with all the furious wand-waving, the story itself never gets to cast much of a spell.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    It's no recipe for hilarity or pitter-pattering hearts, but like our hero's sweets, this pleasant, delicate confection goes down easy enough.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Truthfully, watching septuagenarian whores spank mildly titillated johns and test-drive sex toys has never seemed so ho-hum - or so oddly familiar.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Bergès-Frisbey and Duvauchelle make for a deliciously ripe pair - their cheekbones defy both gravity and sound facial architecture - but Auteuil is less interested in young lust than old world values.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Though its blanketed voiceover narration can be too on-the-nose—it’s a metaphor, we get it—the film packs a psychic punch, thanks to Gedeck’s spectrally wearied face.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    The film is overcrowded with story lines and short on thrust, but fortunately, its protagonists carry the day with their candor and precocious poise.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    It’s a human-size tragedy, one that shows how deadening it can be to remain subject to those who give us life.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Loach coaxes an endearingly poised performance out of nonprofessional Brannigan, and largely sells these scuffling characters as neither hopeless nor heroic—just terribly human.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Rather than an argument or exposé, the movie is a condescendingly narrated demonstration of how money makes the movie world go round. (Stop the presses.)
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    he wild-eyed Celedón 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    The first major motion picture to come out of Congo in decades happens to be one of the best neonoirs from anywhere in recent memory.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Alice Rohrwacher's debut fictional feature is an uncommonly insightful portrait of nascent womanhood, assisted in no small measure by Vianello's disarmingly naturalistic performance.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    There’s a heart here, but with all the superficial noise, it’s hard to hear it beating.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Despite being as pathetically penile-obsessed as any postmillennial comedy, Goon prevails where other sports-film farces fail thanks to Scott's winning, unwinking performance; Liev Schreiber's spot-on turn as a wizened, clock-punching rink assassin; and a pucked-up love of a bloody game.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Though it’s culled from 600 hours of footage, Medora feels thin in terms of memorable imagery, and bounces a little too hastily between scenes. But it’s utterly impossible not to pull for these boys, or for a film that sees them as complex individuals rather than sociological evidence.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    As this engaging, if rote, doc points out, the name Eames, much like Victorian, now defines the style of an era. Yet how many of us knew that the industrial designers behind those midcentury molded mod chairs were an eccentric married team?
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    The unveiling is unnerving, and suggests that some dangers are now permanently beyond our control.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    There are subtler, more allusive films about stormy conflicts of the heart, but A Burning Hot Summer wisely knows when and how to surgically slice directly to the bone. It's a bad romance of the highest order.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    While never uproarious, Punching the Clown exudes the clever, warped sincerity of its star, eschewing uppercuts for a series of playful jabs.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Eager to please and easy on the eyes, The Kings of Summer sails right down the middle, safely tacking between sitcom setups and grandiose MGMT-scored montages without forming its own distinctive feel.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Gil's alternative history gets one thing bang-on right: If Butch were to live into his senior days, he'd absolutely have to be played by Shepard. Wrinkled, leathery and densely carpeted in a salt-and-pepper beard, the 67-year-old playwright and actor still exudes intellectual mischief and hard-stare sex appeal; his self-styled ruggedness is a perfect match for an infamous gringo living incognito.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    The most "Naked City"–worthy aspect is the film's temperature, fixed precisely between cool posturing and broiling anomie. Its vision of contemporary Thailand is recognizable as another society undeserving of redemption, but worthy of poetry.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    An adaptation of a short story from David Sedaris’s best-selling Naked collection, C.O.G. (short for “Child of God”) struggles from the outset to retain the snap of the NPR favorite’s hyperbolic humor while also grounding it in authenticity—a tonal disconnect that nonetheless serves to destabilize a potentially predictable coming-of-age tale.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    This boppy biopic pushes a wealth of outrageous incidents while never making anything resembling a point.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Even as it stands as a cinematic monument to mass suffering, Korkoro can't help but swing, strum and celebrate life for as long as it lasts.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 20 Eric Hynes
    Schwimmer is so committed to telling grim truths about modern living (whither goes humanity in the age of Twitter and sexting?!?) that he abandons the film's tantalizing slide into B-movie exploitation.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    First-time director J. Clay Tweel oversells the importance of both the Vegas event and of magic in general-you'd think he were filming a spiritual movement rather than hidden-ball tricks. His wide-eyed subjects do make magic happen-but that has less to do with illusion than innocence.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    What’s unique to Beadie Finzi’s debut feature is what it reveals about the financial, physical and emotional costs of talent.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    The film develops into a sweet, surprisingly persuasive comedy about friends transitioning into family.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    Uniting Sacha Baron Cohen's daredevilry with Werner Herzog's bombast, Brügger aims to expose "the evilness of North Korea" with a gloriously incoherent, kazoo-and-whoopee-cushion–inflected stage show starring a self-proclaimed "spastic."
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Vamps is commendable, even moving, as a raw-nerve confession of anachronism - but it's also what keeps this strained satire from drawing any real blood.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    There's inherent drama in watching a person amble up a mountain, but it's an act of bad faith to oversell a stunt.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    How the geriatric ensemble dramedy became the last bastion of British cinema is a bit of a riddle, but like Cadbury Creme Eggs and Manchester soul, it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    A lot of history gets horned into this undeniably inspirational parable, though slick execution and simplistic storytelling make it a lesson suitable only for easily impressed elementary-school students.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    It’s a kind of self-portrait made out of quotidian meals, naps and scattershot car-seat conversations, and though the loss that underlies Mark’s emotional state feels like a scripted conceit, The End of Love excels at conveying the moment-to-moment frustrations and exhilarations of being a dad.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    A miniseries, which the BBC once planned, might have worked. In this form, Midnight’s Children has the paradoxical misfortune of being both too rushed and too wearingly long.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    A tepid rom-com, replete with a nostalgic Bangles tune.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Eric Hynes
    From the sun’s surface to the deep earth, Hawaiian volcanoes to Detroit’s decay, Mettler explores the different ways that we experience and define time, using his own documentary as a mind-bending demonstration of its mutability.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Offers an intriguing outsider's document of Russian culture reinventing itself from the outside in; its main export, however, seems to be good old-fashioned Ugly Americanism.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Sorvino's Bronx bawler veers from mascara-streaked monster to outer-borough sage as each scene requires, while Savoca's agitated camera strains for handheld immediacy but ends up just looking amateurish and ugly.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    The performance sequences feel intimate and exhilarating-but in the end, Li's journey is compelling only when he's onstage.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Yet even with the rich, inherently cinematic texture of the urban setting and two excellent native outer-borough actors in Morales and Reyes, Gun Hill Road falters thanks to its paint-by-numbers storytelling.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    The movie indulges a few too many whims, but it's never less than alive.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Brando-wheezing Gandolfini never slums it, but there’s still no shaking the sense that a pro has shown up for amateur hour.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    The Freebie grimly reaffirms the status quo, concluding it's better to have no sex at all than to forsake the Ikea-furnished domestic dream.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    The girls are worth rooting for, but their pursuit is secondary to one sorry-ass dude's redemption. That's a win?
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Postdivorce reconciliation tales - not to mention mother-whore disquisitions - don't get more elaborate than this.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    While veteran director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) and writer Jean-Claude Carrière don’t bring much novelty to the May-December/muse-artist/naked-clothed cliché, they do imbue the material with genuine feeling—exploring the melancholy of waning days and a defiantly naive belief in artistic transcendence.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    LUV
    With its rock-skimming male bonding alternating between grisly homicides and a florid Mexican standoff that begets a tidy take-the-money-and-run finale, this tale seems less timely than merely tall.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Eric Hynes
    It's less a film than one long advertisement for itself-and for the fact that mindless entertainment truly knows no borders.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    The film works to inform as well as to preserve an air of mystery around Bernstein, an apt approach that occasionally slips into the willfully opaque. By all accounts, this secretly important man was tough to live with, but not too hard to love or admire.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Lilien certainly captures Pale Male's wild animal beauty in loving close-up. What his film needs, however, is distance.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    It's another episodic, shaggy-dog parade of L.A. denizens caught in moderately compromised positions.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    Despite a few moments of surprising insight, Twelve Thirty comes off as more mechanistic than organic; it's composed rather than truly lived.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Messina and Ireland thrive under that gaze, and dismaying affectations aside-the characters go needlessly unnamed - the movie articulates the enduring allure of a love defined, and heightened, by restrictions.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Shared tragedy can bind together the most unlikely of people. Movies often make too much of that truism, but surprisingly committed performances from actors like these can still make it feel like something meaningful.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    It's a functional sequel, but with all that spirited slicing and dicing, the director could have at least broken a sweat.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Rote ageist jokes abound (“Do you guys have drugs?” asks a bachelorette; “Does Lipitor count?” responds Kline), but they come with an inclusive, self-deprecating spirit that grows more endearing over the duration.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Eric Hynes
    Cassavetes adopts a grammar that occasionally slides into parody but mostly comes across as committed style. Kiss of the Damned contributes little new to the genre save a taste for alluringly tactile sex scenes and an avoidance of gore.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    While Shapiro does a fine job of emulating kink classics like "Blow Out," his film lacks one element that De Palma wouldn't have been caught dead without: a sense of humor.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Eric Hynes
    The culture wars may be simmering throughout writer-director Ben Hickernell's script-the Save the Whales and pro-choice bumper stickers on Will's VW invite a brutal barfly beatdown-but the real casualties are momentum and narrative cohesion.

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