Hollywood Reporter parts ways with longtime critic Kirk Honeycutt

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

As a film critic for the Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt has by his count reviewed more than 1,000 movies, covering festivals in Cannes, France; Berlin, Toronto, Park City, Utah; and most recently in Busan, South Korea. But after some 20 years writing for the trade newspaper, the veteran journalist has been let go, and will soon leave the paper.

Honeycutt, who also was a film reporter in his roughly 20-year career at the Reporter, most recently was the paper’s international film critic, supervising its overseas reviewers. He served on juries in Athens and Hawaii, prior to his jury work in the inaugural Napa Valley festival, where he judged narrative features. The paper’s lead film critic is Todd McCarthy, who joined the Reporter last year after he lost his job at Daily Variety.

In reviewing Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Skin I Live In,” Honeycutt recently wrote, “…like many lab experiments, this melodramatic hybrid makes for an unstable fusion. Only someone as talented as Almodóvar could have mixed such elements without blowing up an entire movie. He was less impressed with Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” writing, “That a huge worldwide audience is primed for this movie hardly needs stating. But the range of those actually enjoying the onslaught of technology at the expense of human drama might be narrower than (director Michael) Bay, Hasbro or Paramount think.

“ I loved working at THR but eagerly look forward to my next adventure,” Honeycutt said in an email.
Said a spokeswoman for the Reporter: “We appreciate Honeycutt’s contributions during our transition and wish him well in his future endeavors.”

— John Horn

.