Each scene reveals something new about this world and its inhabitants.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jun 24, 2024

Jake’s quest reveals the broken and modern world, but also the failure of the old values that empower men to face themselves as they are, rather than as they should be.

| Jun 6, 2024

Hardcore is a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess, and it’s held together by a galvanizing performance from George C. Scott, an actor so intense that one feels he might bust a blood vessel or 12 in any given scene.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 9, 2023

Schrader’s directorial manner is tightly restrained, spare and unshowy, not even conspicuous in its austerity, but marked by a sleek and fragile tension that suggests a volcano that’s ready to blow just beneath the surface.

| Sep 8, 2023

Paul Schrader’s film chronicles a man’s harrowing descent into a netherworld of total depravity.

| Sep 6, 2023

Both screed and confession...

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 23, 2023

Overall, a clammy and sensationalistic film on a potentially great subject.

| Original Score: C- | Aug 30, 2022

The Motion Picture Industry has exploited women for so many years, in so many ways, that it is hard to think that they can ever top themselves. Well, they have finally reached the bottom of their sewers. It's a movie called Hardcore.

| Apr 27, 2020

...a compelling and often shocking drama that also succeeds as a time capsule of a very specific time and place.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 29, 2020

The movie is nothing but a word game designed to impress a public interested in depraved and industrialized sex. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Aug 6, 2019

Despite its subject, the movie is beyond austerity -- it's inert.

| Jul 19, 2019

Although flawed by a trope-filled ending, "Hardcore" is a fascinating social drama that makes scathing commentary about capitalism and America's puritanical pretenses.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 15, 2017

Hardcore is a softcore porn film that needed to be hardcore to have street cred as a believable investigative film about the porn industry.

| Original Score: B- | Nov 23, 2009

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 24, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 4, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 4, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 29, 2005

A big throbbing stress-headache of a movie, but you won't be able to turn it off.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 3, 2005

Hardcore, flawed and uneven, contains moments of pure revelation.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 23, 2004

Though Hardcore's so-called gritty images do have the power to disturb, it's because we're intrinsically aware of their psychic scourge on the hero

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 5, 2004