Average Rating: 4.8/10
Reviews Counted: 54
Fresh: 17 | Rotten: 37
Despite strong performances and a unique style, The Hottest State is too self-conscious and pretentious to truly succeed.
Average Rating: 5/10
Critic Reviews: 22
Fresh: 8 | Rotten: 14
Despite strong performances and a unique style, The Hottest State is too self-conscious and pretentious to truly succeed.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.2/5
User Ratings: 4,668
Soon after relocating from Texas to New York in a bid to make the big time, a 21-year-old actor enters into a turbulent relationship with a struggling singer/songwriter in writer/director Ethan Hawke's screen adaptation of his own debut novel. William (Mark Webber) is an aspiring actor with dreams of making it big. Upon arriving in New York City, William soon enters into a tenuous romance with Sarah (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a talented musician with a winning voice and keen songwriting skills.
Jun 27, 2007 Wide
Dec 4, 2007
ThinkFilm
All Critics (54) | Top Critics (22) | Fresh (18) | Rotten (39) | DVD (4)
If nothing else, Hawke has managed to recreate, with neurological immediacy, the sensation of being harassed by a selfish, clueless ex-lover.
The movie is crisply shot and obviously heartfelt, but search elsewhere if you want the same honesty Hawke displayed as an actor in 1995's Before Sunrise and its 2004 sequel Before Sunset.
[The two main characters] are in all honesty the least sympathetic and most egregiously boring romantic pair that I've seen onscreen in ages.
It's a small film, it's a mild recommendation, but I still think it's worth checking out.
The main point I can extract from Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State is that even a peevish and self-centered young man is capable of feeling great anguish when his girlfriend dumps him.
Will the world be different, or their lives irrevocably changed, if they break up? I don't think so. Their tree falls in the forest, and nobody cares except the termites.
Breaking up is hard to do. So is making a movie about it. Ethan Hawke, in his adaptation of his own novel, doesn't try very hard. Or maybe he tries too hard.
The film is perfectly fine indie fare, but the plot and the characters seem a little more self-indulgently autobiographical than compelling.
Though there are some nutty and offbeat moments in The Hottest State, these young characters fail to generate any chemistry or 'heated state,' despite their tender years and simmering hormones.
Though there are some nutty and offbeat moments in The Hottest State, these young characters fail to generate any chemistry or 'heated state,' despite their tender years and simmering hormones.
What's apparently deeply personal for Hawke winds up deeply torturous for the audience.
Moody relationship drama is best for adults.
Not the hottest movie.
Everything we see is tinted by a rose-colored self-fondness, down to the perfectly mussed bedheads, the unusually capacious apartments, the lousy bar music that's supposed to be really good.
This is a beautifully made, involving film, but it would have been so much stronger with a bit of careful editing.
The Hottest State lacks heat.
The passionate Mexican interlude, the Shakespearean pleas to yonder windows, and the naive, earnest pillow talk all melt into one self-indulgent, faux-hipstery soup.
It's nothing new, but [writer/director Ethan] Hawke captures some evocative textures and honest moments.
"The Hottest State" from writer/director Ethan Hawke, could have been fantastic. It is ultra-realistic, focusing on the anxieties, hopes and challenges of real people. Where other films invent absurd situations for dramatic effect, "The Hottest State" stays resolutely in tune with real life as it is lived for the vast
September 9, 2007
Super Reviewer
The pacing is quite fractured and the dialogue doesn't always work perfectly, but I personally enjoyed this film to a great extent. Overall, it's a very well-written piece guided by subtle direction from Hawke and excellent performances from the entire cast. Sad, engaging and driven by a sense of rare honesty.
February 12, 2008Super Reviewer
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