Hide Your Smiling Faces
Tribeca Film | Release Date: March 28, 2014 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
69
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 16 Critic Reviews
Positive:
10
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezMar 25, 2014
Featuring two exceptional lead performances from these two boys, first rate beauty-in-ugliness photography and an unusually extraordinary command of tone, Carbone’s picture skillfully articulates the inexpressible. Read full review
90
The New York TimesStephen HoldenMar 27, 2014
As the local boys (there are no girls) explore the natural world in summer, this gorgeously photographed movie bombards you with imagined scents of ripeness and decay. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoMar 28, 2014
What elevates Hide Your Smiling Faces is Carbone's gentle, lyrical touch where other filmmakers would have turned the same thematic concerns into melodrama. Read full review
80
EmpirePatrick PetersJul 28, 2014
Paced with steady assurance, this gentle bildungsroman is a impressive debut from director Daniel Patrick Carbone. Read full review
80
NPRTomas HachardMar 28, 2014
Hide Your Smiling Faces is a striking companion piece to "It Felt Like Love," another recent coming-of-age story, this time about two young girls, from a first-time director. Hide Your Smiling Faces is not as dark as "It Felt Like Love," but like last year's "Sun Don't Shine," the films share a strong sense for the sinister, for how flirtations with new experiences, with excitement, carry a nerve-racking risk of disaster. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsJordan HoffmanMar 27, 2014
This gem captures the unpredictability of a kid’s long summer day. Read full review
80
VarietyGuy LodgeMar 25, 2014
Assisted by the superb performances of his two young, refreshingly unaffected leads, Carbone has a profound understanding of the close but conflicted bond that exists between brothers on either side of the puberty divide. Read full review
80
Film.comJordan HoffmanMar 25, 2014
The landscape is a definitive presence throughout the film, which has almost no music and very little dialogue. The film is short (approximately 80 minutes) and maintains a good sense of dread throughout. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterJohn DeForeMar 25, 2014
Carbone's script doesn't tell a story so much as watch the fluctuations in emotional energy here, quietly observing activities both directly and indirectly related to the loss. As a director he's patient but never sluggish, taking time to appreciate the still landscapes his characters move through. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineWes GreeneMar 25, 2014
Daniel Patrick Carbone's pensive style, so dotted with ethnographic detail, is interested in revealing a world in flux, but his fixation on death is so incessant that it situates the film as a morose fetish object. Read full review
60
The GuardianLeslie FelperinOct 26, 2015
Ultimately, it's mostly a mood piece where not much really happens apart from the inciting incident, but as a study of childhood and adolescence (it makes a great companion piece to Richard Linklater's Boyhood) it's ripe with telling details and atmosphere. Read full review
60
The DissolveMike D'AngeloMar 27, 2014
Smiling Faces is a strongly promising first effort, introducing a talented filmmaker who’s still in the process of finding his own voice. Still, don’t be too surprised if, three or four features down the road, it retroactively looks much more singular. Read full review
60
Village VoiceJonathan KieferMar 25, 2014
Carbone minimizes dialogue and focuses instead on gestural specificity; he makes a useful inventory of boys-will-be-boys behavior — wrestling in fields, poking at scars or dead critters, shutting down on parents — and stages it in tellingly muted vignettes within the ample copses of rural New Jersey. Read full review
50
New York PostSara StewartMar 26, 2014
The many silences in Hide Your Smiling Faces don’t speak quite loudly enough, and the film ultimately gets bogged down by its own ponderousness. Read full review
50
ObserverRex ReedMar 26, 2014
Unfortunately, Hide Your Smiling Faces is so slow it could use a few action sequences to speed things up. Read full review
40
Time Out LondonTom HuddlestonMar 25, 2014
This microbudget indie about a pair of brothers in small-town USA looks great, sports strong performances and doesn’t outstay its welcome. But it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’ve seen all this before, and better. Read full review
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