Email Author Eric Hynes

2012 Stories by Eric Hynes

• In His Great Tabu, Miguel Gomes Offers More

  published December 26, 2012

  Perhaps in response to bombastic mainstream Hollywood, international auteurs often veer toward minimalism—quieter emotions, slower... More >>

• Staring Down Death: The Singular Career of Max von Sydow

  published November 28, 2012

  Imagine Julia Roberts being asked to charm without her smile. Or Paul Newman bereft of those baby blues. That's the kind of handicap given to... More >>

• Alex Cross: The Dumbest Movie of the Year?

  published October 17, 2012

  The action-hero debut of a famous funnyman, the reboot of a neglected cinematic franchise, a strong candidate for dumbest film of the... More >>

• Waits Variations: Six Ways of Looking at Tom Waits, Character Actor

  published October 10, 2012

  In Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths, a prune-faced, simian-mouthed sexagenarian sits by the road in an old suit and... More >>

• Avé

  published October 3, 2012

  As genre unions go, both coming-of-age and love stories are well treated by the conventions of the road movie. There's a barreling,... More >>

• Ira Sachs's Keep the Lights On Is At Last His New York Movie

  published September 5, 2012

  Ira Sachs wants to start at the beginning. We meet on the corner of Delancey and Kenmare, where the filmmaker's New York story started in 1985.... More >>

• The Chilean Building

  published August 8, 2012

  Sometimes the costs of political conviction are only brought into relief in retrospect. Macarena Aguiló’s fascinating first-person... More >>

• Rashida Jones Steps Out On Her Own

  published August 1, 2012

  In terms of looks, charisma, and talent, Rashida Jones should have been a star a long time ago. But in terms of what she's ready to offer... More >>

• Sarah Polley Minds the Gap

  published June 27, 2012

  “There’s no right decision for her to make.” Sarah Polley is talking about one of her characters, but it sounds more like a... More >>

• Unforgivable

  published June 27, 2012

  It might be true that we hurt the ones we love the most, but André Téchiné's epic neo–family drama depicts... More >>

• Stella Days

  published June 20, 2012

  Thanks to its understated elegance and surpassing central performance, this modest, too-eagerly schematic period drama is more engrossing than... More >>

• Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted

  published June 6, 2012

  After New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is through regulating sugar intake via soft drinks, he might want to consider the dubious,... More >>

• Bel Ami: A Tepid Adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's Novel

  published June 6, 2012

  What could be hotter than a bed-hopping bodice-ripper in which the movie hunk of the moment plows through three of the sexiest actresses of the... More >>

• 6 Month Rule

  published May 30, 2012

  You've seen guys like Tyler before. Not so often in the real world, but all the time in the movies. As played by writer-director Blayne Weaver,... More >>

• Hide Away

  published May 30, 2012

  A man (Josh Lucas) arrives at a waterfront wearing a dark suit and shouldering a solitary bag. With hardly a word, he accepts the keys to a... More >>

• Battle Royale: Hunger Games' Darkly Humorous Precursor

  published May 23, 2012

  In a broken world not unlike our own, the state corrals a group of teenagers into a tightly controlled terrain and compels them to murder one... More >>

• Parent Trap: The Narrow Worldview of What to Expect When You're Expecting

  published May 16, 2012

  Even though it doesn't have a story, characters, or setting, Heidi Murkoff's mega-bestselling, 28-year-old pregnancy manual, What to Expect... More >>

• Mahler on the Couch

  published May 16, 2012

  During the late summer of 1910, a distraught Gustav Mahler journeyed to Holland to spend a single afternoon with a vacationing Sigmund Freud,... More >>

• You Hurt My Feelings

  published May 2, 2012

  John is not your typical nanny: He's a sad burly bear of a man who's devoid of both expression and enthusiasm. While caring for two roving... More >>

• What To See at the Tribeca Film Festival

  published April 18, 2012

  To begin its second decade as the largest and most aggressively marketed survey of new movies in New York, the Tribeca Film Festival (April... More >>

• The Other America: Revisiting Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon

  published April 18, 2012

  Guess when Lawrence Kasdan wrote this line of dialogue: "The point is there's a gulf in this country, an ever-widening abyss between the people... More >>

• Unraveled

  published April 11, 2012

  In December of 2008, within days of Bernie Madoff's apprehension, New York attorney Marc Dreier was charged with eight counts of fraud and... More >>

• Whit Stillman's Toe-Tapping College-Girl Fantasy Damsels In Distress

  published April 4, 2012

  Back with his first film in 14 years, Whit Stillman still operates in a world of his own. It's true both in respect to the singularity of his... More >>

• The Trouble With Bliss

  published March 21, 2012

  As today's cinema continues to make plain, no issue is more vital to the state of civilization than the fate of electively unemployed... More >>

• Musical Chairs

  published March 21, 2012

  Three decades after rummaging through the ruins of the downtown punk scene (Smithereens) and immortalizing Madonna, East Village... More >>