Critics reviews

[A] very funny, finally touching fable... For all its outrageous black humour, however, [Henry Fool] remains a Hartley movie, with its wittily stylised dialogue, droll performances, crisp camerawork and its profoundly ironic musings on the nature of art and its status in society - musings which surely reflect on Hartley's own status as an ambitious but marginalised film-maker.

What eventually emerges [from Henry Fool] isn’t nearly as achieved or convincing as the neighborhood portrait, but even when it ultimately overwhelms the characters, [the film is] full of juice, humor, and nuance.

A strangely compelling and, at times, hysterically funny fable, with a cast that does justice to [Hartley's] talent for discovering high drama in even the humblest of characters.

Hartley seems unable to break out of his sophomoric sense of smart humour. The dialogue takes the creaky form of a Beat-style musing on uninteresting existential problems, artlessly punctuated by droll references to bodily functions and daily mundanities. It all comes to resemble a version of The Benny Hill Show for first-year art school students – which does not make for a pretty picture.

[Henry Fool] is a paradox, a bundle of contradictions, many of them lyrical, more of them utterly frustrating... What is right with Hartley's film is its refusal to kowtow to convention and the appetites of the lowest common denominator. How often does a movie celebrate poetry, after all? "Henry Fool" is different, defiantly so, but the director sometimes goes too far.

Though Hartley's ironic stance toward the world is still firmly in place, Henry Fool has a more darkly comic tone as questions of art, commerce, and talent are deftly explored... [The director's] wry distance makes it hard to say for certain what it ultimately all adds up to, but links together smoothly enough as it unfolds.

I don't think this is a bad film, but after seeing it twice I'm unable to respond to it in any clear way. Things happen, and I don't know what they mean, and I have a feeling that in Hartley's view, they need not mean anything... You watch, you are absorbed, and from scene to scene, “Henry Fool” seems to be adding up, but then your hand closes on air.

Movies about literary lives don't always catch fire, but "Henry Fool" is a glorious exception: an austerely funny, brilliantly written and acted... [The film] has wit and edge, compassion and sensibility, [and it] is an exception to the chic triviality and pale ambition of a lot of recent American independent low-budgeters... "Henry Fool" [is] one of the year's best American movies.

[Henry Fool] is the same as [Hal Hartley's] impressive back catalogue - quirky talk-driven curiosities about people living on the fringes of society - yet somehow different, managing to imbue his usual obsessions with the freshness and vitality of a first-time director.

"Henry Fool" is far and away writer-director Hal Hartley's best movie... To spell out the details would spoil the experience. Put simply, there are levels of truth and observation here that Hartley had never before attempted -- and few filmmakers ever reach.

[Henry Fool] aspires to be a meditation on (among other things) art, trust, loyalty, politics and popular culture. With utter simplicity, and with unexpectedly intense storytelling, it achieves all that and more... [The film] is its own testament to the power of words... Hartley's splendidly articulate screenplay is as exacting as his visual style..

Poetic, bawdy, contemplative, often side-wrenchingly funny and finally quite touching... [Henry Fool] delights in its sheer control, and love of the power of words... When it’s good, the script for “Henry Fool” is Hartley at his funniest and most left-field.