The Day He Arrives
Cinema Guild | Release Date: April 20, 2012 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
83
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 11 Critic Reviews
Positive:
11
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
SalonAndrew O'HehirApr 22, 2012
But at his best - and his new movie, The Day He Arrives, is among his very best - Hong offers a strange mixture of magic, mystery, rueful melodrama and dry comedy that's like absolutely nothing else. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisApr 19, 2012
The Day He Arrives has real force and its experimentation is in the service of a moving story about a man who, as he says at the start, has nowhere to go. And so he returns to a bar, a woman and situations that are always the same and yet always different - snow falls during one kiss but not another - playing a director whose life resembles a movie he keeps remaking. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertJul 4, 2012
The movie finds the right tone to present its bittersweet wisdom. It's relaxed. It's content to observe and listen. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineJaime N. ChristleyApr 20, 2012
The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of Hong Sang-soo's The Day He Arrives. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubNoel MurrayApr 18, 2012
The Day He Arrives is a talky movie, full of long, boozy scenes and cosmic coincidences - and in that it echoes Allen, as well as Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the best of British kitchen-sink drama. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnApr 17, 2012
Maintains a funny and sad focus on its single petulant subject. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterMaggie LeeApr 17, 2012
Serves as an amusing itinerary of dining, drinking and sexual dalliance that beguilingly plays with narrative time. Read full review
80
Village VoiceNick PinkertonApr 17, 2012
Like Rohmer, Hong is wonderful with atmospheric effects, using whirling snowfalls to place his characters' inchoate longing in relief. Read full review
80
Time OutKeith UhlichApr 17, 2012
A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives - shot in luminous black-and-white - might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day." Read full review
75
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyJul 19, 2012
The verb in the title of The Day He Arrives doesn't refer so much to a traveler reaching a destination as to a man finding himself - or hoping to. Read full review
70
VarietyJustin ChangApr 17, 2012
An agreeably meandering exercise that brings some clever French New Wave fillips and structural repetitions to Hong's characteristically boozy party. Rougher but more approachable than his previous "Oki's Movie." Read full review
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