Critics reviews

...Here the filmmaker largely elides the questions that these actions raise. Given the many blows that Hurt delivers to viewers and the vividness with which Zweig captures his subject, it feels like a relatively small failure. But it's still a significant one for an artist who's so keenly aware of the gulfs that exist between our finest, noblest ambitions and the ways we endure all the cruel jokes that fate enjoys at our expense.

A great achievement of Zweig's humane and haunting film is how inherent to and inseparable from the proceedings his voice seems. He ultimately speaks not on our behalf, but out of his own relationship with his maddeningly endearing subject. The result offers a level of genuine, all-cards-on-the-table intimacy often sought but rarely achieved in cinema.

Zweig, though, ensures the doc is more than just white-trash reality TV. Firstly, because of the palpable respect he has for the characters on-camera. But also because he weaves in footage of Fonyo from the height of his 15 minutes of fame, full of patriotic pomp and ceremony. Zweig does it in a way that suggests lionizing people sometimes has consequences.

[Zweig] speaks up supportively and judgmentally. It's a putative violation of documentary ethics, which of course strengthens the emotional core of the work: it's clear that Fonyo is a person who people care about, usually in spite of himself. What weakens Hurt is the clichéd formalism imposed on the material: the obtrusive slow motion and hectoring music cues that are meant to make it a more fully "cinematic" experience but which undermine its overall impact.