DIRECTOR: Michel Gondry

CAST: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood

REVIEW:

Taking its quirky title from a poem by Alexander Pope, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a product of offbeat French music video and movie director Michel Gondry and the twisted mind of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, is stimulating and refreshing proof that a movie’s existence within the “romantic comedy” genre—sort of—does not inherently doom it to cookie-cutter formula. There’s nothing conventional or formulaic about this charmingly eccentric, visually inventive movie, which uses a quirky and original premise to explore themes of love, loss, memory, and the ideas that “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”, and that we need all of our memories, both happy and painful, to make us who we are.