Eric Hynes

The ghosts of the Holocaust

Shoah: A Film About Death

Eric Hynes
Returning to movie screens a full generation after its initial 1985 theatrical run, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah has in many ways become obscured by its reputation. Whether or not you've ever seen a frame of the film, you probably know of its monumental length (nine and a half hours), grave subject......

LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS

Eric Hynes
LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS From a jaunty Spin Doctors–scored opening to a teary, Regina Spektor–cued finale, Love and Other Drugs will switch to any style, station or frequency to keep you entertained. Or at least not bored. (Maybe awake?) The most egregious four-quadrant pander-party of the year, Ed Zwick's latest......
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Not Without My Daughter

Eric Hynes
It's hard to fault Doug Block for being too attached to the past. He's got an archive of footage drawing him back, and a portable DV posterity-preserver complicating his present. "Don't you want to rewind and go back to the fourth grade?" a fellow father asks in Block's The Kids......
Film Socialisme

Same As It Ever Was

Eric Hynes
When Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love closed out the 2001 New York Film Festival, many in Lincoln Center's sold-out Alice Tully Hall must have anticipated a "return to form" from the playful postmodernist of Breathless, A Woman Is a Woman and Band of Outsiders. What they actually saw from......

STRANGE POWERS: STEPHIN MERRITT AND THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

Eric Hynes
STRANGE POWERS: STEPHIN MERRITT AND THE MAGNETIC FIELDS Demanding of recognition but ever pushing back at attention, Stephin Merritt is a droopy-eyed Marlon Brando of art pop. A notoriously difficult interview, the singer-songwriter is prone to epic pauses and blank stares, and even his shyness can come across as condescension,......

WASTE LAND

Eric Hynes
GO  WASTE LAND A fascinating, deftly layered look at the complex intersections of art and charity, reality and perception, Waste Land follows celebrated New York artist Vik Muniz back to his native Brazil, where he'll work with outer Rio garbage-pickers on an ambitious art project. Ostensibly called to "give back"......

Same As It Ever Was

Eric Hynes
When Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love closed out the 2001 New York Film Festival, many in Lincoln Center's sold-out Alice Tully Hall must have anticipated a "return to form" from the playful postmodernist of Breathless, A Woman Is a Woman and Band of Outsiders. What they actually saw from......

WASTE LAND

Eric Hynes
GO  WASTE LAND A fascinating, deftly layered look at the complex intersections of art and charity, reality and perception, Waste Land follows celebrated New York artist Vik Muniz back to his native Brazil, where he'll work with outer Rio garbage-pickers on an ambitious art project. Ostensibly called to "give back"......

INHALE

Eric Hynes
INHALE Ripped from the headlines and sensationalized for your would-be pleasure, Inhale uses the appalling phenomenon of illegal organ trafficking as the basis for an almost-as-appalling hyperventilated thriller. Opening and closing cards inform us that organ demand outpaces supply by a ratio of 10:1, and that 15,000 people annually are......
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NOWHERE BOY

Eric Hynes
NOWHERE BOY English art star Sam Taylor-Wood’s oddly straightforward biopic about the juvenile John Lennon concludes, as well it should, with the singer’s haunting, incantatory primal scream, “Mother.” But instead of tying a bow on the film’s portrait of familial abandonment, Lennon’s guttural, air-cleaving quaver puts everything that precedes it......