Metacritic reviews

Slickly charming, genteelly erotic and directed with supreme polish, Cashback is a conventional romantic comedy that plays unconventional games with time and memory.

A modest but engaging film that mixes hormonal surges with art-house ingenuity.

It's no small trick to blend fantasy, slapstick and genuine emotion, but Ellis pulls it off with whimsy to spare.

Imagine "Clerks" director Kevin Smith with a background in poetry and painting instead of comic books and bestiality jokes, and you'll have an idea of what to expect from an exciting new filmmaker named Sean Ellis, whose terrific debut is called Cashback.

The film's structure is a little awkward, almost certainly as a result of its being expanded from 20 minutes to 97.

Writer-director Sean Ellis more-or-less successfully expands his Academy Award-nominated 18-minute short to full length, showcasing his talented young cast to good effect.

The movie is lightweight, as it should be.

The movie is too cute by half, made close to unbearable whenever Ben's narration spews glib pseudo-profundities about memory and temporal stillness. But the flaky humor of wage slaves serial-killing time is good, rude fun.

Springs from that childhood fantasy of being able to stop time and wander freely among the temporarily frozen. If only writer-director Sean Ellis had done more than use the conceit for a functional romance.

With Biggerstaff's breathless narration explaining every detail of the action, Cashback seems aimed at an audience that would rather be told a story than shown a movie.