An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty Reviews
About.com
An artistic but unpretentious examination of young love, with all its uncertainties and mini-tragedies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Top CriticBold and varied animation sequences lift this into the stratosphere before it falls back into Nance's obsessively layered narrative; the resulting film is both beautiful and disorienting (just like love).
While the movie doesn't paint a clear sense of Nance's emotional side, one thing is certain: He is an artist with creativity to spare. This effort may not have been wholly successful, but it's a promising start to what could be a thrilling career.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It is an emotionally exhausting but ultimately rewarding kaleidoscope of video, animation, words and music - and feelings on top of feelings on top of feelings.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The excess and earnestness suit the subject - the ephemeral and all-consuming nature of romantic love.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
What saves the film-and grandly-is Nance's wildly ambitious visual imagination.
A dense, organic, dazzling and funny tapestry, making use of varied and subtly colored animation and stop-motion; candid video; playfully verbose direct address; chapters and footnotes and doodles; and suavely chosen music and sonic bridges.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Film Journal International
Chock-a-block with creativity and cleverness, but ultimately too much of muchness.
This musical, elliptical, personal, poetical, sensual indie produced by Jay-Z has a seductive DIY feel and a lineage that's part early Spike Lee and late Charles Bukowski.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
AALBC.com
Ghetto psychobabble strictly for the attention-deficit, Jay-Z demographic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Overambitiousness can turn a valentine into hot air and white noise, but it can also serve as a calling card for an artist finding his pitch-and Nance is indeed an artist, pure and simple.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
This brisk and self-searching, sharply intelligent and deeply vulnerable romantic comedy is a masterwork of reflexive construction.
Antagony & Ecstasy
Incredibly heartfelt and sincere and urgent... It is the film that it is because it is sloppy and rough.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8/10
Nerdist
On the one hand, its multiple postmodernist levels and medium shifts make it one of the most original movies of the year. On the other, its relative lack of substance...is frustrating and causes the film to run out of juice about halfway through.
Slant Magazine
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is a serious but never somber offering from a member of the Brooklyn boheme 2.0 generation.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Experimental debut is an engaging essay film about (probably) unrequited love.
AV Club
I doubt I'll see a more visually inventive film at this fest-or this year, that matter-but I do wish that Oversimplification were easier to connect to.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
