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100Not only (Kaufman's) most accessible and romantic screenplay, it's his most complete. The third act works like a charm and pulls all his themes, characters and conflicts together beautifully.
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100A complicated story that demands your full attention; Mr. Gondry unfolds it at a mind-bending pace. This alone makes it a hugely refreshing respite from ordinary multiplex fare.
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100A thoughtful, audacious meditation on love and relationships that finds a group of wildly disparate talents clicking together in perfect unison.
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100A masterpiece? Probably. Ingenious? Absolutely! Unforgettable? I'll see you at the 10th-year anniversary.
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100Audacious, thought-provoking and ruefully funny.
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100It's a trippy but tender examination of human emotions, relationships, all-consuming love.
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100A wildly imaginative, hugely entertaining tour de force that asks big questions about life and love and fate while never ceasing to fully engage the viewer.
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100Fresh, heartfelt and ultimately heartbreaking in its honest portrayal of a modern relationship.
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100A delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.
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100Watching Eternal Sunshine, you don't just watch a love story -- you fall in love with what love really is.
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100Feels like something entirely brand-new; such are the gifts of Kaufman and Gondry, inventors and magicians.
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100This is the best movie I've seen in a decade. For once it's no hyperbole to say, "Unforgettable!"
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100One of those rare collaborations that artists dream of, and that film lovers crave.
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100Gondry's virtuosity lifts the film far past science fiction into cinematic efflorescence. He shows us, more seductively than other directors have done, how freehand use of film can capture the flashes in our minds that slip between words.
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100A Chayefsky movie isn't hard to identify, but I think it's safe to say that these days a Charlie Kaufman movie is even more recognizable.
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91Adventuresome, melancholy and exhilarating.
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90A surprisingly bittersweet love story at heart, Eternal Sunshine values the sum of experience, which in this case means a thorns-and-all openness to romantic possibilities.
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90It's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.
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90A memory play and a sleight of hand, Eternal Sunshine is more than anything else deeply sincere. Like Spike Jonze, who directed "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich," Gondry succeeds principally by balancing Kaufman's churning skepticism with unflinching hope.
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90Kaufman may be counting on the audience's will, insistence and yearning to create a coherent love story from the shards and shrapnel he provides us.
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90If films about coping with memory loss and/or reverse-order storytelling now constitute a mini-genre, then Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is arguably the best of the lot.
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90Neither wholly cynical nor wholly romantic, Kaufman's story is a balance of smarts and sentiment. It's the most fully realized working out of his two favorite obsessions: the subjective nature of experience and the psychological mysteries of pair bonding.
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90Ingenious, exhilarating, funny and profound.
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88Chases so many ideas that it threatens to spin out of control. But with our multiplexes stuffed with toxic Hollywood formula, it's a gift to find a ballsy movie that thinks it can do anything, and damn near does.
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88Despite jumping through the deliberately disorienting hoops of its story, Eternal Sunshine has an emotional center, and that's what makes it work.
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88It is by turns comic, dark and surprisingly tender. If one must reduce it to simple description, call it a love story with a twist. Or a twisted love story.
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88This is unlike any other film I have seen... it's a great romance. It's willingness to flout conventions and eschew formulas is just one of many things to celebrate about this charmingly eccentric movie.
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80For once, Carrey is more than merely tolerable. He's actually good, and the film that ebbs and flows around him is something you won't soon forget.
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80Not particularly funny, or even very sunny, but it is Charlie Kaufman's first whole screenplay, and as wonderful as it is weird.
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80For most of Eternal Sunshine, I found myself fighting off Gondry's hyperactive intrusions in order to get at the melancholia at its core. Fortunately, the idea behind this movie is so richly suggestive that it carries you past Gondry's image clutter.
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80There aren't many performers who can deliver the fullness of heart that such a plot demands, but Winslet is one of them. [22 March 2004, p. 102]
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75Always engaging, never boring. You constantly appreciate Kaufman's intelligence and Gondry's lively filmmaking.
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75The thinking is shallow. The emotions are tepid. But the creativity is dazzling. If that sounds like a slam, consider that most Hollywood screenplays are predictable, rote and functional -- and those are the good ones, folks.
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75This is the art-film Carrey: repressed, lovesick, unshaven. Essentially he's doing the same intellectual sad sack played by John Cusack in "Malkovich" and Nicolas Cage in "Adaptation"
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75You'll be rewarded with a terrific finale. The twists here are the rare sort that seem both narratively surprising and emotionally engaging.
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75For all the silliness, Kaufman is posing a serious question: Are we better off forgetting things that brought us pain, especially if we didn't change or grow as a result? You may not agree with his conclusion, but who else in Hollywood would pose this query at all, or explore it in such a daffy, gratifyingly inventive way?
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75While it's flawed and often tedious, Kaufman's script is, on the whole, boldly imaginative and enjoyably challenging.
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70Represents a failure of nerve: As if Gondry and Kaufman weren't sure that the story of Joel and Clementine would hold us, the doomed couple's unfolding-in-reverse romance is intercut with a subplot filled with zany touches.
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70So daring, well-made and tirelessly inventive that I kept asking myself, "Why isn't this even better? Why isn't it moving me?" One huge problem is the hero... he's played by 42-year-old Jim Carrey, whose still-bottomless need to be loved invariably smacks of desperation and self-pity.
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70This angular and intelligent romantic comedy isn't entirely consistent. Even as you laugh, it's a movie you admire more than love.
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50Wants to be a bittersweet comedy about erotic loss and memory loss. But it doesn't have the heart or brain.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 231 out of 260
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Mixed: 5 out of 260
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Negative: 24 out of 260
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TroelsJ10
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AllisonL.10
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JasonJ.9