Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

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.

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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Watching Eternal Sunshine, you don't just watch a love story -- you fall in love with what love really is.

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

It's a trippy but tender examination of human emotions, relationships, all-consuming love.

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.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

Feels like something entirely brand-new; such are the gifts of Kaufman and Gondry, inventors and magicians.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

A delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Audacious, thought-provoking and ruefully funny.

Slate David Edelstein

This is the best movie I've seen in a decade. For once it's no hyperbole to say, "Unforgettable!"

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

A masterpiece? Probably. Ingenious? Absolutely! Unforgettable? I'll see you at the 10th-year anniversary.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

One of those rare collaborations that artists dream of, and that film lovers crave.

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.

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.

Film Threat Mariko McDonald

Fresh, heartfelt and ultimately heartbreaking in its honest portrayal of a modern relationship.

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.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Adventuresome, melancholy and exhilarating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Ingenious, exhilarating, funny and profound.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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"

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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

While it's flawed and often tedious, Kaufman's script is, on the whole, boldly imaginative and enjoyably challenging.

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.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

Always engaging, never boring. You constantly appreciate Kaufman's intelligence and Gondry's lively filmmaking.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.