|
New This Week
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search
Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Focus Features
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for language, some drug and sexual content
Starring
Jim Carrey,
Kate Winslet,
Elijah Wood,
Mark Ruffalo,
Kirsten Dunst,
Tom Wilkinson,
and
David Cross
Joel (Carrey) is stunned to discover that his girlfriend Clementine (Winslet) has had her memories of their tumultuous relationship erased. Out of desperation, he contacts the inventor of the process, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Wilkinson), to have Clementine removed from his own memory. But as Joel's memories progressively disappear, he begins to rediscover his love for Clementine. (Focus Features)
| GENRE(S): |
Comedy
|
Drama
|
Romance
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Charlie Kaufman (also story)
Michel Gondry (story)
Pierre Bismuth (story)
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Michel Gondry
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: September 28, 2004
Video: September 28, 2004
Theatrical: March 19, 2004
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
108 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |
Charlie Kaufman received an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
Not 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.
100
Premiere
Glenn Kenny
A 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.
100
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
Watching Eternal Sunshine, you don't just watch a love story -- you fall in love with what love really is.
100
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
A thoughtful, audacious meditation on love and relationships that finds a group of wildly disparate talents clicking together in perfect unison.
100
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
It's a trippy but tender examination of human emotions, relationships, all-consuming love.
100
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
A 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.
100
Dallas Observer
Robert Wilonsky
Feels like something entirely brand-new; such are the gifts of Kaufman and Gondry, inventors and magicians.
100
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
A delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.
100
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
Audacious, thought-provoking and ruefully funny.
100
Slate
David Edelstein
This is the best movie I've seen in a decade. For once it's no hyperbole to say, "Unforgettable!"
100
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
A masterpiece? Probably. Ingenious? Absolutely! Unforgettable? I'll see you at the 10th-year anniversary.
100
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
One of those rare collaborations that artists dream of, and that film lovers crave.
100
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
A 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.
100
Film Threat
Chris Barsanti
How appropriate that one of the most daring films to hit screens in years is brought to a level of true mastery not by a great idea or nifty plot device, but by a simple love story.
100
Film Threat
Mariko McDonald
Fresh, heartfelt and ultimately heartbreaking in its honest portrayal of a modern relationship.
100
The New Republic
Stanley Kauffmann
Gondry'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.
91
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
Adventuresome, melancholy and exhilarating.
90
Washington Post
Michael O'Sullivan
Neither 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.
90
Los Angeles Times
Manohla Dargis
A 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.
90
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Scott Tobias
A 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.
90
Time
Richard Corliss
Kaufman 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.
90
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
It's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.
90
Variety
Todd McCarthy
If 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.
90
Washington Post
Ann Hornaday
Ingenious, exhilarating, funny and profound.
88
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Chases 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.
88
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
Despite jumping through the deliberately disorienting hoops of its story, Eternal Sunshine has an emotional center, and that's what makes it work.
88
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
This 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.
88
USA Today
Claudia Puig
It 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.
80
TV Guide
Ken Fox
For 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.
80
The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
There 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]
80
New York Magazine
Peter Rainer
For 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.
80
Empire
Colin Kennedy
Not particularly funny, or even very sunny, but it is Charlie Kaufman’s first whole screenplay, and as wonderful as it is weird.
75
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
This 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"
75
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
The 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.
75
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
While it's flawed and often tedious, Kaufman's script is, on the whole, boldly imaginative and enjoyably challenging.
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
You'll be rewarded with a terrific finale. The twists here are the rare sort that seem both narratively surprising and emotionally engaging.
75
Chicago Tribune
Mark Caro
Always engaging, never boring. You constantly appreciate Kaufman's intelligence and Gondry's lively filmmaking.
75
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
For 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?
70
The New York Times
A.O. Scott
This angular and intelligent romantic comedy isn't entirely consistent. Even as you laugh, it's a movie you admire more than love.
70
Salon.com
Stephanie Zacharek
Represents 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.
70
LA Weekly
John Powers
So 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.
50
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Wants to be a bittersweet comedy about erotic loss and memory loss. But it doesn't have the heart or brain.
 The average user rating for this movie is 8.6 (out of 10) based on 325 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Read more user comments...
Discuss this movie in our forums |
|
