Amateur

Austin Chronicle by

Amateur offers the inimitable Hartley style with a harder edge than his earlier films, and while the thriller elements of Amateur prove entertaining on a bigger scale, this entertainment may not endure for viewers not completely committed to Amateur's characters and Hartley's slow-motion storytelling.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

Amateur is a curious mixture of high art and delicious campiness, and the result is a funny, insightful, and almost-hypnotic motion picture.

Boston Globe by Jay Carr

Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

If you can swallow one more amnesia plot and one more recycling of favorite bits from Godard's Bande a part, pressed to serve yet another postmodernist antithriller about redemption, this has its compensations.

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

Amateur gives the impression of a sloppy first draft. It begins with a splash, meanders until it reaches feature length, then ends abruptly.

Los Angeles Times by Peter Rainer

Hartley turns what might have been a lurid pulp thriller into a freeze-dried art thing. He squeezes all the juice out of pulp. [19 May 1995]

Rolling Stone by Peter Travers

Amateur is Hartley heaven, a sharp-witted thriller that takes off into dark and uncharted territory.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

I found the idea of the plot more interesting than the plot itself, and am finding the movie more fun to write about than to see.

Variety by Todd McCarthy

Just as quirky and idiosyncratic as the Gotham-based writer-director's earlier efforts, this one pushes the spiky humor a bit more to the fore while unfolding a tale loaded with offbeat oppositions and odd character detailing.

San Francisco Examiner by Walter Addiego

The particulars of the plot don't make a great deal of sense, but Hartley's films have much more to do with style, or rather a philosophical refusal to show emotional involvement.