For everything Bynum gets wrong in the final act, he makes up for in fun and inventive storytelling in the first half.

| Original Score: B | May 9, 2024

The Timothee Chalamet Experience rolls through town with A24's moody 90s teen drama Hot Summer Nights, or, Kewl Largo, where Goodfellas meets The Sandlot...

| Feb 11, 2022

A twenty-second long sequence of a sticky and moist exchange of a lollipop is one of the most immersive sequences I have seen in some time.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 6, 2018

In the end, Hot Summer Nights leaves the viewer with an an intoxicating aftertaste and a glow of enthusiasm long after the credits roll.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 11, 2018

Generically crafted coming of age film with an unstable tone and clichéd plotting.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 30, 2018

It winds up feeling anodyne when it should feel explosive.

| Aug 9, 2018

While Bynum captures the year of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and its transitional early-'90s fashions with melancholic vividness, his paper-thin story of minimal character development ultimately resolves to a shrug.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 8, 2018

Incredible truth and honesty are at the heart of this coming of age film, and those looking for an emotionally-charged and vibrant story about the complexities of youth and love should look no further than Hot Summer Nights.

| Aug 6, 2018

This coming-of-age drama is more familiar than fresh, although there's an earnest authenticity to the characters and the setting.

| Aug 3, 2018

Hot Summer Nights is more interested in style over substance, character tropes over character. Without that, the audience is just as lost as the characters on screen.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Aug 1, 2018

It's largely director Elijah Bynum's casting that makes this movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 31, 2018

Hot Summer Nights will appease fans of Chalamet by his presence alone, but this is a movie that plays like a CW-infused take on the nostalgic drug drama.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 31, 2018

Hot Summer Nights is both groan-inducingly contrived and vapid, its talented young cast wasted on an incoherent script-less a web of betrayal, greed, and adolescent desire than a few dangling threads.

| Original Score: C | Jul 28, 2018

You've seen it all before. But you haven't seen, and should, "Hot Summer Nights."

| Original Score: B | Jul 27, 2018

There's plenty to look at, but nothing really works here.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 27, 2018

Pervasive drug culture, strong language in drama/thriller.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 27, 2018

Hot Summer Nights stumbles, grasping for meaning and mood, relying heavily on one of the more insistent soundtracks in recent memory.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 27, 2018

Bynum has excellent taste, but his debut feature suffers from a crisis of identity that mirrors that of his hero, a confused teenager who ambles his way into serious trouble.

| Jul 26, 2018

Although every cinematic experiment and story beat doesn't always work, "Hot Summer Nights" is downright intoxicating, oozing with panache and sensuality from every pore.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 26, 2018

It's all just a setup, really, for a great group of young actors-Chalamet, in particular-to flex their relatability muscles, filling in archetypes with nuance and color.

| Jul 26, 2018