TSPDT

Key Production Countries: USA, UK
Key Genres: Comedy Drama, Romantic Comedy, Romance, Domestic Comedy, Black Comedy, Comedy
Key Collaborators: Michael Spiller (Cinematographer), Martin Donovan (Leading Actor), Ted Hope (Producer), Steve Rosenzweig (Production Designer), Bill Sage (Character Actor), Steve Hamilton (Editor), Matt Malloy (Character Actor), Robert John Burke (Leading Actor), Elina Lowensohn (Leading Character Actress), Parker Posey (Leading Character Actress), Karen Sillas (Leading Character Actress), George Feaster (Leading Character Actor)

"For almost 20 years, people have been asking “What happened to Hal Hartley?” But the acclaimed independent director of such unsung ’90s classics like The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, and Henry Fool never actually went away. He directed some theater, made plenty of music, served as a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and, of course, continued to make personal, uncompromised films… Hartley remains one of American cinema’s foremost chroniclers of wayward malaise; his existential portraits foreground their artifice while plumbing genuine emotional depths. His indelible characters are embittered romantics who encompass a bevy of contradictions: they’re sincere and ironic, passionate but apathetic, principled yet inevitably compromised. In other words, they’re true human beings." - Vikram Murthi (Roger Ebert.com, 2020)

"Hartley's is the cinema of intelligence, in which preconceptions are challenged, assumptions suborned, and expectations over-turned - this alone is enough to ensure, thank God, that the doors to the major Hollywood studios are probably now forever closed to him." - Mario Reading (The Movie Companion, 2006)

"Many of his excellent early films were shot in his native Long Island on shoestring budgets, offering breakthrough roles to Parker Posey, Edie Falco, and Martin Donovan. The Unbelievable Truth, Surviving Desire, Simple Men, and especially his literate 1990 romance, Trust, were smart suburban dramas peppered with deadpan philosophizing, scored with Yo La Tengo tracks and Hartley’s own guitar playing—arty anthems for a generation of film lovers, embraced by a small, proud subculture and held very tightly by it." - Logan Hill (New York Mag, 2005)

"Hartley's serious comedies explore the ordinary lives of witty and independent-minded men and women, using dialogue that veers unexpectedly between the flat and the philosophical. The Unbelievable Truth (1990), Trust (1990) and Surviving Desire (1991) all display his idiosyncratic style admirably." - The Movie Book, 1999

"Since his 1990 debut, the Nuclear Age romantic comedy The Unbelievable Truth, Hartley has established himself as both a poet of the working class suburbs and an aspiring student of the French, British, Japanese and Swedish auteurs of the mid 20th century. Only Woody Allen, an admitted influence, and Wes Anderson (clearly influenced) are as consistent and prolific." - Marc Spitz (Salon, 2015)

"Hal Hartley is a quirky but genuine talent who has made his mark as an award-winning independent filmmaker. His films are modestly scaled, seriocomic portraits of chance encounters between disparate outsiders - characters who typically engage in elliptical exchanges, debating everything from philosophical issues to the workings of internal combustion engines, but don't always learn anything from their discourses or their adventures. Hartley's deft, offbeat comedy is highlighted by circuitous, layered bantering with punchlines coming late, if at all." - The Hollywood.com Guide to Film Directors, 2004

"Hal Hartley is a true independent, boasting one of the most idiosyncratic bodies of work in all of contemporary cinema. First emerging in the late 1980s and early ’90s with a fully formed sensibility on display in the barbed romantic comedies The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, he quickly became one of the most acclaimed voices on the indie circuit. But while many of his peers moved toward the mainstream, Hartley continued to cultivate his own decidedly personal methods." - The Criterion Channel