First-time director Penny Panayotopoulou's approach to the delicate subject matter is commendably tactful and tasteful--it's also underdramatized, monotonous, and short on humor.
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Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Bill White
Panayotopoulou casts a transcendent eye upon her downbeat subject matter, never dodging the unsentimental truth that growing up is about learning to live with the loss of those things we have loved.
An involving family drama about a young boy's dreams and personal loss, Hard Goodbyes: My Father brings a light touch -- and a full measure of unaffected charm -- to potentially downbeat material.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
Panayotopoulou does handle the material with sensitivity, but she relies too much on her young hero's unlikely precocity, which unwittingly diminishes the intensity of a child's very real grief.
San Francisco Chronicle by John McMurtrie
A tender, gently paced coming-of-age movie whose strength is its young lead actor.
Panayotopoulou's background in photography shows in the way she lets her chiaroscuro lighting mirror her characters' emotions. It also shows in the still-life quality that Hard Goodbyes never quite gets beyond.
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
Like the moving 1999 American "A Walk on the Moon," with Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, Hard Goodbyes juxtaposes a family crisis with the excitement of the period before and during Neil Armstrong's 1969 moonwalk.