Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Reviews
Top CriticWorks marvel after marvel in expressing the bewildering beauty and existential horror of being trapped inside one's own addled mind, and in allegorising the self-preserving amnesia of a broken but hopeful heart.
It's the kind of film that could mean more to people after they've left the theater and thought about it awhile.
There is little charm in the coupling and almost no erotic intimacy, just a series of nerve-racking conversational collisions.
The disappointment I felt at the end of Eternal Sunshine was almost crushing, simply because there were sections of it that were as daring in their emotional directness as anything I've seen in years.
Neither wholly cynical nor wholly romantic, Kaufman's story is a balance of smarts and sentiment.
The perfect movie about love's inevitable imperfections.
Gets it more than right by stripping the science down to its laptop basics -- it's a 'simple' memory-erasing process -- and by putting greater emphasis on the humanity behind the diodes.
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| Original Score: 4/5
This is the best movie I've seen in a decade. For once it's no hyperbole to say, 'Unforgettable!'
It's a scruffy, blurry puzzle to put together, and well worth the effort -- just be sure to clear a tabletop for it in your mind.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The thinking is shallow. The emotions are tepid. But the creativity is dazzling.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Carrey is essentially the straight man, yet he's rarely been funnier. And Winslet is perfect as the model of an unstable woman who's bad news but irresistible.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A happy collision of cutting-edge writer, stars up for a challenge and a director with a taste for the symbolic.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Gondry still lags behind Jonze in rendering cohesive stories and human connection from Kaufman's adventures in self-analysis.
Audacious, thought-provoking and ruefully funny.
| Original Score: 4/4
A masterpiece? Probably. Ingenious? Absolutely! Unforgettable? I'll see you at the 10th-year anniversary.
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| Original Score: 4/4
This mind-bender is both funny and touchingly romantic.
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| Original Score: B
The twists here are the rare sort that seem both narratively surprising and emotionally engaging, particularly the one that boxes us into this interrogative corner.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Dizzying, dazzling, smart and, most importantly, honestly struggling with the variables of love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a mesmerizing mind game that still manages to find perfect pitch while pulling heartstrings.
| Original Score: A
The effort can fascinate, even if the result doesn't always match.
| Original Score: B
Despite jumping through the deliberately disorienting hoops of its story, Eternal Sunshine has an emotional center, and that's what makes it work.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A poignant story set in a clever plot amidst exceptional performances.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A thoughtful, audacious meditation on love and relationships that finds a group of wildly disparate talents clicking together in perfect unison.
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| Original Score: 4/4
What's lacking is what the movie is ostensibly about: the heart that so often leads us to fall in love with the wrong people at the wrong time.
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| Original Score: 2/4
At once heartfelt and hilarious, another Kaufman-esque mix of black comedy, shaggy-dog romance, retro sci-fi and metaphysics.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's giddy and groundbreaking, a feast for the head and the heart.
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| Original Score: A
Michel Gondry's angular and intelligent romantic comedy isn't entirely consistent. Even as you laugh, it's a movie you admire more than love.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The hiccups and eccentricities that define a Kaufman script -- the anguished neuroses, the narrative kinks -- are firmly in the service of a touching love story, not the other way around.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Although the characters are unremarkable, Kaufman and director Michel Gondry ... have some thought-provoking things to say about the nature of memory.
| Original Score: 3.5/5
It's a trippy but tender examination of human emotions, relationships, all-consuming love.
| Original Score: 4/4
In addition to matching Kaufman's wild imagination with equally startling visuals, Gondry has also managed to get the best, most mature and sharply focused performance ever from Jim Carrey.
You constantly appreciate Kaufman's intelligence and Gondry's lively filmmaking.
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| Original Score: 3/4
As techno-wacky and surreal as the movie gets, what gives it a genuine, beating heart is Kaufman's insight about relationships.
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| Original Score: B
May be the first movie I've seen that bends your brain and breaks your heart at the same time.
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| Original Score: A
A unique romantic comedy, unfettered by the normal expectations of the genre, is a rare and wondrous thing.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A bold and venturesome trip down memory lane as only writer Charlie Kaufman could imagine it.
Do you feel clever, punk? Well, do you? Because that's the only way to get your head around the latest Charlie Kaufman flick.
If films about coping with memory loss and/or reverse-order storytelling now constitute a mini-genre, then pic is arguably the best of the lot.
A remarkable film that can coax a smile about making the same mistakes in love and then sneak up and quietly break your heart.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
... a strange, sometimes confusing and often brilliant black comedy.
