Hereafter

Directed by Clint Eastwood

(PG-13)

***

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You don’t have to be as old as Clint Eastwood to be moved by his somber new meditation on mortality, said Claudia Puig in USA Today. With “quiet force,” the 80-year-old director has woven together the stories of three people in different countries who have been affected by death and are pondering communications that seem to emanate from the hereafter. Matt Damon is “superbly understated” as a reluctant psychic. The actors who play a tsunami survivor and a London boy who’s just lost his twin brother turn in equally subtle performances. But Eastwood and his screenwriter seem so allergic to clichés about the spirit world that the film has almost no place to go, said David Denby in The New Yorker. They end up having to tie its three stories together in “laughably unconvincing ways.” Fortunately, Eastwood is a director who can “wade into swamps of sentimental hokum and come out perfectly dry,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. His austere style gives Hereafter enough “power to haunt the skeptical, to mystify the credulous, and to fascinate everyone in between.”