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100What's much more fascinating and enriching is Eastwood's Olympian vision, the sympathetic and all-encompassing understanding of the pain and grandeur of life on earth.
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100This is a film for intelligent people who are naturally curious about what happens when the shutters close.
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90This is quiet but potent filmmaking that believes nothing is more important than the story it has to tell.
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90One of the reasons that Hereafter works as well as it does - it has the power to haunt the skeptical, to mystify the credulous and to fascinate everyone in between.
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88As a result, Hereafter isn't so deep that it will change the way many people think about the afterlife. But it is heartfelt and thoughtful and, in a way, comforting.
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88Eastwood and Morgan's movie, with its epic natural disasters (and a terrifying, man-made one) is optimistic. Hokey, even. But it's beautiful, too.
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88It calmly examines death, grief and melancholy, packing an unexpectedly profound emotional gut-punch.
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80Damon's portrayal is perfectly understated yet powerful. It's also sneaky; you don't realize how invested you've become in it until the final act, when the characters' stories merge in what seems like too much of a rushed coincidence.
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80The film never is less than intriguing, right from its tour de force opening sequence, and often full of insights into why people long for answers, sometimes with great urgency.
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75Hereafter is a fascinating, absorbing motion picture, but will work only for those willing to surrender to the story as it unspools at its own deliberate rate.
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75A multi-character melodrama about the supernatural that's affecting both in spite of and because of its flaws.
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75Hereafter, set to a resonant Eastwood score, truly is haunting.
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75There is plenty of excitement and pulse in Hereafter, as well as a reluctance to provide easy answers to life's great mysteries. I'm happy to see a great director take on the challenge of new and different material with his customary grace and impressive two-fisted technique intact.
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70The movie will divide some Eastwood fans, conquer others. The naysayers will be grateful that, from this healthy, workaholic actor-director, there is always the promise of a good movie - if not here, then hereafter.
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70A beguiling blend of the audacious and the familiar; it dances right on the edge of the ridiculous and at times even crosses over, but is armored against risibility by its deep pockets of emotion, sly humor and matter-of-fact approach to the fantastical.
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70Lacks the toughness of Eastwood's best work.
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67The signature Eastwoodian music that the director lays over the proceedings - piano tinkle, guitar pluck, and an echo of Rachmaninoff out of Noël Coward's Brief Encounter - can't hold the assemblage together.
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60Though I found Hereafter meandering and occasionally sentimental, I couldn't help but admire Clint Eastwood's ambition in taking on-headfirst-the greatest fact of human existence.
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60It's as if everyone involved in the film figured they could keep Hereafter from turning ghost-story hokey by making it grounded, beautiful and matter-of-fact. And it sort of works. There are no inadvertent giggles here; it just doesn't add up to enough, after.
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55It's hard to know how much of what's wrong with Hereafter stems from Morgan's screenplay, which lacks the characteristic tartness (and brains) of other movies he's written, like "The Queen" and "Frost/Nixon."
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50His (Eastwood) first boring film.
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50Hereafter is a consistently identifiable Clint Eastwood movie only in the sense that the prolific filmmaker shows that he still has the ability to confound our expectations of him.
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50It starts out with a tsunami - and ends up standing in a puddle.
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50Damon, trapped in an inert character, shows little inner turmoil.
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50Morgan and Eastwood are scrupulous in keeping their notions of the afterlife as general and inoffensive as possible. They have no religious or spiritual worldview to sell. As I say: Many admire this film to no end. I found its use of recent tragic events, including the London underground bombing, to be more than a little cheap.
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50Starts out feeling formidable in scope and theme but ends up awfully small and precious.
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50When an 80-year-old director turns his attention to death, you hope for some insight, or gravitas, or even whimsy or anger. Hereafter has none of that.
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50Hereafter is unpredictable enough to be consistently watchable.
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Oct 21, 201050Though Hereafter has plenty to give you pause: its plot flatly insists there's an afterlife without really doing much with the matter, metaphorically or otherwise.
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50Hereafter doesn't feel like a Clint Eastwood film; it's more like a very special edition of John Edward's psychic TV show.
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50Hereafter occupies some muzzy twilight zone, too woo-woo sentimental to be real, too limp to make for even a halfway decent ghost story.
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50It's the first boring performance of Damon's career, although the bland inertia may not be his fault. The way Eastwood stages the "readings," they hold no terror for George.
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50Just because a film takes place entirely in the long shadow of death doesn't mean it has to be this relentlessly dour.
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42Eastwood and Morgan are not con artists, but their awe here is so unblinking that their film comes across as a transcendent con job.
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42It isn't a lack of realism or philosophical consistency that rankles most, though, but rather the anticlimactic story and uninteresting characters that make this Hereafter not very sweet at all.
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40Slow, ponderous and as shallow as it thinks it is deep, lifted only by an impressive opening and fine work from Damon and Howard.
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40What was Clint thinking? (Or Martin Scorsese, when he made "Shutter Island," for that matter.)
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40A movie that opens with a sensational bang and then proceeds to pursue the Big Questions about life and death in lovely, lugubrious and increasingly off-putting fashion, until all its drama has been frittered away in a dreamy, drifty haze.
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38This Herefter, despite the odd engaging moment, is a terrible letdown, like investing in a belief system and discovering there's no "here" that you've been after all your life.
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30Hereafter is not just a stretch for Eastwood, it's a contortion. The irrationality of the premise is exceeded only by the strategic irrationalities of the plot.
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30Either you buy their Vaseline-lensed visions of the hereafter, or you watch in stony silence, as I did, wondering why there's no one to care about.
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20It doesn't help that Eastwood's laconic style is as torpid as it was in such misfires as "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" and "Changeling."
User score distribution:
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Positive: 37 out of 63
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Mixed: 8 out of 63
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Negative: 18 out of 63
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10This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.