Hard Eight Critic Reviews

One of the best films of the year.Read the full review

Anderson, who makes as impressive a directing debut as has been seen in some time, creates a perfectly modulated mystery that doesn't even feel like one. It's a character play, and Hall, Reilly and Paltrow are so convincingly damaged they take on the properties of fine china.Read the full review

Four excellent lead performances, vividly evoked ambience and a masterfully sustained mood of quiet desperation mark Sydney as an impressive piece of work. Read the full review

Movies like Hard Eight remind me of what original, compelling characters the movies can sometimes give us.Read the full review

Paul Thomas Anderson shows off the same sort of quirky smarts that Joel and Ethan Coen did in "Blood Simple." Read the full review

The role of Jimmy is one of Mr. Jackson's scarier characters, and this brilliant actor inhabits all four corners of his jittery, avaricious personality. When he and Sydney finally clash, the movie makes its darkest, cleverest turn into film-noir nightmare. Read the full review

We accept the sincerity and altruistic motives of the aging loner he (Philip Baker Hall) portrays in this consciously spare Nevada-set sleeper. [13 March 1997, p. 8D]Read the full review

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson crafts a plot of manipulation and chance, in which some zigs and zags are more convincing than others. Still, his feel for scuzz, for people living at the raw extremes of appetite, is palpable. Read the full review

There's something almost hypnotic about the way Hard Eight develops -- even in its slowest, most tedious moments, it keeps our attention. Read the full review