The Hottest State Critic Reviews

Hawke has made this movie his way and the result is a story that is by turns romantic and disquieting. It's well worth the price of admission.Read the full review

In The Hottest State, Hawke uses fairly standard childhood motivations for his unhappiness and reveals too little real interest in the Sara character.Read the full review

A viewing of The Hottest State is likely to conclude with a crosstown sprint of a different kind: As soon as the credits start rolling, you can't wait to get out.Read the full review

Personal and heartfelt, it's nevertheless bogged down by a lack of perspective on the material and a pointlessly frilly visual style.Read the full review

At around the halfway point, its characters’ haranguing voices begin to grate on you. People in their early 20s, even pretty people, lose their appeal when they dwell this obsessively on their own inchoate turmoil.Read the full review

Hawke has created a standard-issue, Sundance-friendly indie film that's full of the predictable angst suffered by Manhattan artistic types, but unfortunately the lead characters are both so callow that you finally don't care much about them.Read the full review

Patchy lead perfs and mannered helming subtract value from pic's tangible plus points (solid supporting turns, pleasant score).Read the full review

Judging by the far more interesting adults in the film--Braga, a terrific Laura Linney as Webber's mother, and Hawke as his father--the solution for Webber and Moreno is to grow up and not be so full of themselves. In their current state, they make for unpleasant company, and so does the film.Read the full review

When Laura Linney turns up about an hour into The Hottest State, you can see the movie that might have been.Read the full review