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80Slickly charming, genteelly erotic and directed with supreme polish, Cashback is a conventional romantic comedy that plays unconventional games with time and memory.
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A modest but engaging film that mixes hormonal surges with art-house ingenuity.
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75It's no small trick to blend fantasy, slapstick and genuine emotion, but Ellis pulls it off with whimsy to spare.
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75Imagine "Clerks" director Kevin Smith with a background in poetry and painting instead of comic books and bestiality jokes, and you'll have an idea of what to expect from an exciting new filmmaker named Sean Ellis, whose terrific debut is called Cashback.
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75A sleek little meditation on beauty, desire, love and time. Now and then, it's fairly sophisticated stuff.
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75The film's structure is a little awkward, almost certainly as a result of its being expanded from 20 minutes to 97.
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70Writer-director Sean Ellis more-or-less successfully expands his Academy Award-nominated 18-minute short to full length, showcasing his talented young cast to good effect.
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63The movie is lightweight, as it should be.
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60Much more than a tits and arse farce, this is an enjoyable, if lightweight effort.
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50Ellis' slight film has its charms, and the backstory he concocted to lead into the original 18-minute short is effective. But the film lags badly in the middle.
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50With Biggerstaff's breathless narration explaining every detail of the action, Cashback seems aimed at an audience that would rather be told a story than shown a movie.
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The movie is too cute by half, made close to unbearable whenever Ben's narration spews glib pseudo-profundities about memory and temporal stillness. But the flaky humor of wage slaves serial-killing time is good, rude fun.
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50Springs from that childhood fantasy of being able to stop time and wander freely among the temporarily frozen. If only writer-director Sean Ellis had done more than use the conceit for a functional romance.
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50Best known as a still photographer, Ellis has a powerful motif in the idea of stopping time, yet he can't seem to move his characters along.
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42In short form, Cashback simply dealt with how a quirky group of supermarket employees whiled away the endless hours of a night shift, but the feature version spoils that economy by tacking on a romantic subplot and indulging its hero's precious ruminations on love and art.
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Cashback suggests a "Malcolm in the Middle" episode directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The hero's pained, hilarious childhood flashbacks deserve a much better movie.
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25Director Sean Ellis has a lovely eye, but he's set the film in his blind spot. Not only can't he distinguish between art and porn, savoring and wallowing, universal truths and exhausted clichés -- he doesn't even seem interested in these distinctions.
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