Hard Candy

2.00
    Hard Candy
    2005

    Synopsis

    Hayley’s a smart, charming teenage girl. Jeff’s a handsome, smooth fashion photographer. An Internet chat, a coffee shop meet-up, an impromptu fashion shoot back at Jeff’s place. Jeff thinks it’s his lucky night. He’s in for a surprise.

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    Cast

    • Elliot PageHayley Stark
    • Patrick WilsonJeff Kohlver
    • Sandra OhJudy Tokuda
    • Odessa RaeJanelle Rogers
    • G.J. EchternkampNighthawks Clerk
    • Cori BrightGirl in Nighthawks (uncredited)

    Recommendations

    • 100

      Film Threat

      A tough sit, but it attracts more than repels you. It commands your attention. Once it lands its hooks in you, there's no tearing away.
    • 90

      Village Voice

      A film that forges identification with its victimized heroine like none I've seen in decades. (The Nova Scotia–born Page, a Molly Ringwald type who was only 15 when the movie was made, leaves little doubt as to whether a kid can play a grown-up's icky game and win.)
    • 90

      The Hollywood Reporter

      To pull this kind of thing off you need exceptional performances, and the two leads rise commandingly to the challenge. Wilson, best known for his work in the screen version of "The Phantom of the Opera" and HBO's "Angels in America," keeps his true colors effectively muted throughout the bulk of their face-off, but it is Page who astonishes.
    • 88

      ReelViews

      These are two fascinating characters, and watching them thrust and parry proves to be as impossible to turn away from as observing a grotesque roadside accident.
    • 83

      Entertainment Weekly

      Hard Candy is extreme - a battle of the sexes that glides from tricky to angry to shockingly ugly.
    • 70

      Variety

      A spectacular performance by teenage thesp Ellen Page elevates this disturbing slice of designer shocksploitation into a film that's impossible to dismiss on principle.
    • 60

      L.A. Weekly

      The more things drag on, the more monotonous they become and, by the end, Hard Candy has devolved into a rather transparent game of one-upmanship in which Hayley and Jeff come across in almost equally repellent measure, their behaviors driven less by organic impulses than by their need to satisfy the script's elaborate series of reversals and counter-reversals.
    • 58

      The A.V. Club

      Had they ended 20 minutes in, "Wedding Crashers" would qualify as a gut-busting triumph, and Hard Candy would be a miniature masterpiece.

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