76
Metascore
7 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100Boston GlobeTy BurrBoston GlobeTy BurrThe arrival of Raúl Ruiz’s final work, Night Across the Street, brings the total to four, an elegant, clear-eyed bridge game of artists playing their last trump cards.
- 80Time OutDavid FearTime OutDavid FearThis surreal, sentimental journey does provide an excellent encapsulation of everything Ruiz did best: oddball takes on highbrow lit and lowbrow genre conventions, guided tours of characters’ mazelike memory banks, and a reveling in film culture that doubles as a cinephile’s wet dream.
- 80Village VoiceMichelle OrangeVillage VoiceMichelle OrangeProof that Ruiz was still teeming with ideas himself, Night is a characteristic work of surreal wit and circuitousness—and the filmmaker's winking but mournful goodbye.
- 75Slant MagazineJaime N. ChristleySlant MagazineJaime N. ChristleyIt's a final film in the specific sense of Raúl Ruiz designing the larger part of it around a metaphorical contemplation of his own, imminent demise.
- 70VarietyJustin ChangVarietyJustin ChangThe valedictory sentiments at the heart of this mysterious experiment are conveyed with characteristically wry wit and great generosity of spirit.
- 70The New York TimesA.O. ScottThe New York TimesA.O. ScottUnlike his precursors Georges Franju and Luis Buñuel, who reveled in the shock of incongruity, Mr. Ruiz took it in stride. His gliding, floating camera could make wild impossibilities look utterly natural. And so it is in Night Across the Street, where the present commingles with the past, and seeming is another way of being.
- A bizarre and baroque meditation on death, memory and the passage of time that ranks among the director’s more cryptic works (of which there are several in his whopping 100+ feature filmography), though it does offer up a few pleasurable moments.