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Teasing Chloé Zhao's Hamnet. Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal .

domino harvey wrote: Sat Aug 30, 2025 7:00 pm Stone’s frontrunner status lasted all of a day or two, as apparently Jessie Buckley is now widely tipped after Hamnet massively overperformed into being the new overall frontrunner (and it has the best notices of the year so far)

Unbelievably embarrassing pull quote being used by the movie’s official account

domino harvey wrote: Thu Nov 13, 2025 3:05 pm

domino harvey wrote: Sat Aug 30, 2025 7:00 pm Stone’s frontrunner status lasted all of a day or two, as apparently Jessie Buckley is now widely tipped after Hamnet massively overperformed into being the new overall frontrunner (and it has the best notices of the year so far)

Unbelievably embarrassing pull quote being used by the movie’s official account

I saw this too, and it piqued my curiosity, so I went to The Rolling Tape. First of all, gotta say, this is maybe the worst film-related website I have ever navigated - badly designed, insanely slow and taxing on my computer, and it stopped me from loading more than a couple pages at a time because I had "sent too many requests." Lots of little things are wrong with it in a way that to my eyes indicate that the people behind it have slapped it together from a very front heavy template without consideration of what the site would do - there's a cart, even though you can't buy anything, etc. I'm also not sure how the site sustains itself. They don't run ads on it. Do they make all their money off the 14 paid subscribers to their patreon?

The guy who runs it - owns and hosts the website, does the podcast editing, is "credited" with the images, whatever that means - is currently working on a Master's degree in architecture. In a similar vein, most of the reviews appear credited to college kids or recent college graduates, and the writing is generally pretty bad. Some of it is just bad, some of it is, uhhh... let me put it like this - it's not like there's any smoking gun or anything, but if someone stopped me on the street and told me that 90% of certain reviews were AI-generated and they were merely spiced up by the "writer" before being posted, I wouldn't call that person a liar. The weird thing, though, is that the quoted phrase at the very least does not appear in their review of Hamnet, hyperbolic, florid, and comically reverent though it is. Maybe it appears in one of the podcast episodes where they talk about it. Or maybe it's a completely bullshit quote a la last year's Megalopolis campaign

domino harvey wrote: Thu Nov 13, 2025 3:05 pm Unbelievably embarrassing pull quote being used by the movie’s official account

Hah. So I’m reading The Naked and the Dead and found on the cover this pull quote from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Perhaps the best book to come out of any war.

So better than The Iliad, The History of the Peloponnesian War, War and Peace, The Magic Mountain…

Not quite as embarrassing as yours (there’s a “perhaps”), but still a doozy. Yours reminded me of it.

Never Cursed wrote: Thu Nov 13, 2025 3:44 pmSome of it is just bad, some of it is, uhhh... let me put it like this - it's not like there's any smoking gun or anything, but if someone stopped me on the street and told me that 90% of certain reviews were AI-generated and they were merely spiced up by the "writer" before being posted, I wouldn't call that person a liar.

This is an impressively bad review, but I have my doubts that it’s AI because the grammar and structure here are abysmal. That’s like the one thing AI can do well (to the point of everything sounding like the lifestyle section of a local free weekly paper). If anything it makes me a little nostalgic for how the internet used to be full of awful movie reviews like this, before everything got streamlined. But you are still right that even if they didn’t say it verbatim, quoting this site was already embarrassment enough

domino harvey wrote: Thu Nov 13, 2025 5:09 pm

Never Cursed wrote: Thu Nov 13, 2025 3:44 pmSome of it is just bad, some of it is, uhhh... let me put it like this - it's not like there's any smoking gun or anything, but if someone stopped me on the street and told me that 90% of certain reviews were AI-generated and they were merely spiced up by the "writer" before being posted, I wouldn't call that person a liar.

This is an impressively bad review, but I have my doubts that it’s AI because the grammar and structure here are abysmal. That’s like the one thing AI can do well (to the point of everything sounding like the lifestyle section of a local free weekly paper). If anything it makes me a little nostalgic for how the internet used to be full of awful movie reviews like this, before everything got streamlined. But you are still right that even if they didn’t say it verbatim, quoting this site was already embarrassment enough

I threw the review into an AI text detector and it said that it thought certain sections were AI generated rather than the whole review. My suspicion is still that that this "writer" asked ChatGPT or something for a review, elaborated on what it gave them, and then posted it. The problems with the grammar and structure are I suspect from the author taking generated text and poorly rephrasing or adding to it

domino harvey wrote: Thu Nov 13, 2025 3:05 pm Unbelievably embarrassing pull quote being used by the movie’s official account

Not to double-post, or indeed to Ruimypost, but World of Reel identified the snag: Focus Features smushed together words from the review and from the twitter account of the person who wrote the review reacting to the movie.

DarkImbecile wrote: Mon Sep 01, 2025 1:32 pm Least surprising take from me incoming: Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet is fantastic, two truly great lead performances supporting a script that carefully and crushingly interweaves personal tragedy and the universality of great art. Buckley is, as widely reported by now, devastating, and Mescal nearly comes from behind to match her during the transcendent final sequence. Zhao delivers on multiple levels, as the film boasts mystical, haunting visuals, sound design with remarkable depth and power, and some remarkable child performances. If I had to identify a solitary quibble, it’s that the score is largely derived from pre-existing, oft-heard pieces (I’m not the best at identifying scores, but I think Richter is heavily taken from — effectively, certainly, but the lack of originality stood out to me amidst the rest).

I didn't like this very much. As expected, Buckley is good and will likely get her long-deserved actress win for a complex, tragic performance. Mescal is good too, but the child actors are fantastic and on a whole other level. The Richter score at the end took me out of the movie during the climactic moment, because as you say, the same piece has been used over and over again to much better effect (especially in Arrival, less so in Shutter Island). As for the rest, I dunno, it all just felt like a hackneyed tale of grief - Buckley is the only character allowed inner intricacy, and the Power of Art angle comes too little and too late. I generally think that Zhao is a hack, and threatens to ruin decent ideas with quietly manipulative tendencies, but clearly I'm in the minority. Despite the crowd I saw this with mostly loving it, I doubt this will land with people to any degree near One Battle After Another and will be surprised if it takes anything but actress. Still, nominate the kids for god's sake

I was also quite underwhelmed by this, despite hearing plenty of sniffles amongst my fellow audience members. It's a very cookie cutter tale, of lovers meeting and being happy and then growing apart due to the tragic death of their child. The only thing added is that the husband turns out to be Shakespeare and he writes a famous play that heals them as individuals and as a couple. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I didn't find it very moving. The Hamlet performance is overall quite effective, but the

Spoiler

audience all reaching their hands out to the actor playing Hamlet

with the overused Richter piece playing was a little too fucking much for me.

It was also kind of unintentionally funny hearing Jessie Buckley

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channel Will Smith with "Get my son's name out your FUCKING mouth" (not verbatim) at the beginning of the performance

.

domino harvey wrote: Thu Nov 13, 2025 5:09 pm

Never Cursed wrote: Thu Nov 13, 2025 3:44 pmSome of it is just bad, some of it is, uhhh... let me put it like this - it's not like there's any smoking gun or anything, but if someone stopped me on the street and told me that 90% of certain reviews were AI-generated and they were merely spiced up by the "writer" before being posted, I wouldn't call that person a liar.

This is an impressively bad review, but I have my doubts that it’s AI because the grammar and structure here are abysmal. That’s like the one thing AI can do well (to the point of everything sounding like the lifestyle section of a local free weekly paper). If anything it makes me a little nostalgic for how the internet used to be full of awful movie reviews like this, before everything got streamlined. But you are still right that even if they didn’t say it verbatim, quoting this site was already embarrassment enough

My first guess after reading it was that the viewer was pretty young, and they are not a professional reviewer and just someone who is just trying their hand at reviewing a film. It’s on par with something I would find on a random Letterboxd review. Clicking through on the author’s profile confirmed my suspicions. I definitely don’t want to shame the author — it’s no crime to be young and inexperienced and trying something new — but if the website wants to establish some degree of credibility they might want to exercise more editorial discretion.

therewillbeblus wrote: Thu Nov 20, 2025 3:47 am Still, nominate the kids for god's sake

Helped immeasurably that I kept seeing Jacobi Jupe as a tiny Orson Welles.

Found some worthwhile things in this. As easy and regressive as female-nature/male-urban shorthand can be, I thought attempts to frame motherhood as an artistic process worked well enough when witchy/mystic elements were kept to burble. Found resonance mirroring the passing of spirit from one person to another with the pain of transition between media. Zhao may hammer at one central (and suggestive) visual motif, but the blunt way it landed at the end worked. And the tech credits are lovely to the point of distraction, there are times I was pleasingly focused on fabric textures.

I too bristle at how manipulative Zhao can get (I do not know how much it matters to see Spielberg and Mendes among the producers, but it makes sense), but my biggest problem with her may also be the result of one of her strengths: She loves to watch her actors play, but doesn't love them enough to edit that play to its potent parts. There's a disparity between ideas and run time. Buckley is great, of course she is, but the camera hangs on her so long some times I felt pity for the performer. The climactic performance is dictated by text and the music, not by action, so instead of Buckley's simple, moving gesture it has to become something overwrought. How many times do we cut to Mescal doing nothing behind a curtain? Goal-line fumble.

Is this 5 threads that got stitched together?

Noiretirc wrote: Sun Dec 28, 2025 6:07 am Is this 5 threads that got stitched together?

Just 3

I am not sure "disappointed" is the word I would use as this year marked my return to watching new releases in the theater and so far I've been disappointed by most of what I've seen (going on trailers and earliest praises) though I wouldn't say I've seen any truly bad films so far this year. "Underwhelmed" might be a better description. There was quite a bit to like, particualrly in the acting & cinematography. However the writing seemed to falter such that the final scene fell flat for me & I suspect without Richter's music it would have been even more hollow. The final scene didn't ring true to me because I had a hard time believing that this particular couple would never have discussed anything about his work or life in London and that she would just travel to see a play on her own, fight through the crowd to get to the front of the stage and then emote on cue when Hamlet performs. It just felt too contrived for me to get any emotional engagement with the narrative and then the Richter music feels like a cheap stunt to accomplish what the writing did not.

I thought this was awful, an all-out assault of lame manipulation where most scenes are based primarily around nuzzling, shouting, or crying. I was stunned at the shamelessness of moments like

Spoiler

little Hamnet wandering around an LED-lit afterlife shouting “Mama, where are you?”,

or Buckley and Hamnet having some sort of psychic abilities, or Mescal as Shakespeare reciting the “To be or not to be” soliloquy wholecloth while looking over a ledge. I’ll go against the grain and say the acting was also uniformly bad, but how could it be good when the approach is so limited to immediate effects? The sets were what got me through.

Lowry_Sam wrote: Sun Dec 28, 2025 9:01 pm The final scene didn't ring true to me because I had a hard time believing that this particular couple would never have discussed anything about his work or life in London and that she would just travel to see a play on her own, fight through the crowd to get to the front of the stage and then emote on cue when Hamlet performs. It just felt too contrived for me to get any emotional engagement with the narrative and then the Richter music feels like a cheap stunt to accomplish what the writing did not.

I would love to see the scene of Jessie Buckley standing there, perplexed, as her dead son castigates her for shagging his uncle before stabbing a bloke to death through the arras.

Lowry_Sam wrote:I had a hard time believing that this particular couple would never have discussed anything about his work or life in London and that she would just travel to see a play on her own, fight through the crowd to get to the front of the stage and then emote on cue when Hamlet performs.

Where there's a Will, Anne hath a way.

I'll leave now...

Gotta add my voice to the chorus here. I was definitely negatively inclined towards the film already, as I didn't like Nomadland and happen to know some things about the time period depicted, but even putting that aside Hamnet is one of the dumbest prestige movies I've ever seen. I've nothing against emotional manipulation in art (far from it!), but every major sequence is transparently, irritatingly calculated to bring either tears or "a-ha" moments at recognizing a famous line. The biggest question I have is one of purpose: why pretend that any (or indeed all) of Shakespeare's most famous work was directly inspired by unknowable personal moments or tragedies? Is it not an enormous insult to Hamlet to pretend that one of the most well-known and highly regarded literary works in the English language was exclusively inspired by the memory of a dead family member - in other words, that it has one intended meaning, inscrutable to everyone except the playwright and those directly related to him? It's an interpretive cop-out, and it would not flatter Zhao to make even if she did not stage the climactic performance with all the tear-jerking bombast of a John Lewis Christmas advert (to paraphrase one particularly unkind review). Other films concerning Shakespeare have taken similar approaches without making cause for embarrassment (Shakespeare in Love), but those were generally broader,, had a more humorous approach to the period, and would have collapsed under their own weight if they had tried to imply a perfect correlation between life and art.

Some of the period details are mistaken on a level that transcends CinemaSins whining and actually makes the movie make less sense if you know what's going on:

Spoiler

1. There's a moment late in the movie where Shakespeare buys Agnes a bracelet shortly after Hamnet has died, with the intent being a sort of hack "husband buys unhappy wife jewelry" beat. The problem is that buying jewelry in commemoration of someone who had recently died was a very common behavior in Elizabethan England, to the point that people would leave their family and friends money to do so, and it very much seems like that's what Shakespeare has done, making Agnes' subsequent outburst, rather than the act of buying the jewelry, petulant. I bring this up because this is actually a perfect example of the film's problematic attitude towards the period elements, where it constantly reduces them to behaviors that modern audience members would recognize to make really obvious points.

2. Lowry_Sam beat me to this, but in what would would Agnes not know anything about Shakespeare's job or his plays to the point of expressing surprise and confusion at the idea of Shakespeare staging a play? He had, by that point, become one of the most famous actors and writers in England. Their big new house in Stratford was paid for with the money he got for performing for the Queen.

3. The climactic scene itself makes little sense in terms of staging and where most of the characters are. Agnes (the wealthy wife of the playwright) is somehow in the cheapest standing-room section so that she can have her moment with the "dying" Hamlet. Shakespeare washes off his ghost makeup before his final scene, and stands staring from behind a curtain in full view of half the audience. And the idea of Elizabethan groundlings oohing, ahhing, and weeping en masse at the climax of a play reduced one Shakespeare expert I know to actual tears of laughter.

Nor did I really appreciate any of the craft outside of the intricate production design. Buckley is fine at crying/looking pensive, but Mescal is badly miscast and appears to be going for a socially dysfunctional, off-putting, almost stereotypically autistic Shakespeare, which adds nothing and is perplexing to watch. No one else registers (including the kids, sorry). The film is also marred by an editing style that attempts to copy Malick-esque jumping between moments without actually having the coverage to do so, leading to some really sloppy cuts, failures to establish location and the position of characters in scenes, and jarring jumps between locked-off cameras on dollies and handheld shaky-cam. Of course Zhao co-edited the movie, so this is on her too. I have no clue what this director's fans see in her work, no idea what they could be getting from it that they could otherwise find from someone that hadn't spent the majority of their recent career directing a Marvel movie, a video game commercial, and an episode of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot.

Never Cursed wrote: Fri Jan 16, 2026 1:38 am...transparently, irritatingly calculated to bring either tears or "a-ha" moments at recognizing a famous line.

Please tell me they re-enacted a famous Spike Milligan joke between Agnes and William.

hearthesilence wrote: Fri Jan 16, 2026 2:42 am

Never Cursed wrote: Fri Jan 16, 2026 1:38 am...transparently, irritatingly calculated to bring either tears or "a-ha" moments at recognizing a famous line.

Please tell me they re-enacted a famous Spike Milligan joke between Agnes and William.

No but I wish they had, that would have actually been a huge improvement over the

Spoiler

actual "to be or not to be" line from the movie

, which is so unintentionally funny that I laughed out loud, drawing a couple of sidelong glances from other viewers in the theater. And I do not say that as a point of pride; I actually don't like drawing attention to myself in that way at all, but it was just a reflex because it was so pitifully staged.

Gotta agree with everyone who found this lacking, this just felt like a poor effort from everyone involved, except for Buckley, and I'd say that she had the opposite problem of over-effort. There wasn't really a moment of this that felt real to me, or even very sincere ... felt more like the filmmakers all going through the motions of prestige filmmaking without any conviction in the material. I actually thought it picked up some life when the play is staged, because even as wan as the film's staging is, just by virtue of existing it's still better than anything that came before it in the film.

And I agree with Never Cursed that Zhao in particular is a huge problem here. There were any number of simple directorial choices that were off-putting to me. This is a movie of big emotions, but the camera placements seem to blunt a lot of that, as if pushing these characters away. It demands big performances from its actors but feels to me like it leaves them hanging. For example, the early scene where they consummate their relationship is filmed from an anachronistic high corner angle, like a security camera in a convenience store. Lots and lots of medium shots that make the characters feel small but without any reason behind it. The movie feints at Malick-y nature stuff, especially early on, but it feels more like someone spying on these characters. Which may even be kinda thematically applicable in a way, given the rumors that the other characters have heard about Agnes and how that fuels a lot of the events of the story in some way or another, but if Zhao is leaning into the gossipy nature of the material, she's done so without any of the mischief or voyeuristic excitement or underhanded fun or whatever you want to call it of gossip. Which I guess is all a long way of saying that the movie never really seems to take its material very seriously, despite the over-serious tone, but it's also humorless.

Honesty compels me to report that most of the audience I saw it with - a pretty full house, albeit in a small auditorium - seemed to react to it much more than I did. But like I say, I thought it was lifeless prestige junk.

Malick allegedly loved it

Gonda passed along comparably high praise from someone whose default position is normally silence: his mentor, Malick, who had recently sent him an email reacting to the film, and told him that he had permission to share it with his colleagues, which he did for the first time during this interview: “Dear Nic, I watched Hamnet last night. My heart was in my throat the whole time. I felt shaken to the core. It was searing, wondrous. What a magnificent piece of work. Please tell Chloé and the whole filmmaking team what you all know so well: what a wonderful film you all have made, full of love, tenderness, humanity and compassion. Love, Terry.”

Added Gonda, “As long as I’ve known him, I’ve rarely seen him speak up like that.

”… full of love, tenderness, humanity and compassion.”

Hold up, are we absolutely sure that he wasn’t talking about Melania?

tbh, I could see Malick liking Zhao's work in general based on The Rider and Nomadland, though I have no idea if he's ever seen those.

He has tastes that I would not necessarily expect for someone of his artistic inclinations (see: his love of Green Day). But this appears to be a favor in the service of someone who got two of Malick's own movies off the ground.

What I love about that story is that I actually do something similar with movies I've seen many times (often silent films but even sound films) - I'll just throw on some albums to hear over the visuals, and not anything intended to match the movie either. I originally did it with a couple of Oscar broadcasts just to make them tolerable, and then for whatever reason did it with movies that were incredibly familiar - possibly to test used albums I bought while revisiting a movie to study its visual aesthetics. Not having the matching soundtrack actually did seem to refocus my attention to the film in a way and certain compositional elements actually became more noticeable without, say, a scene's dialogue to absorb my attention. I didn't know Malick viewed cut footage in similar fashion until Criterion's Blu-ray of The Thin Red Line came out, but it didn't seem crazy to me, I totally got it.