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Milk
Focus Features


8.5

based on 36 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 53 votes
Read user comments
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FILM:

Internet Movie Database

MPAA RATING: R for language, some sexual content and brief violence

Starring Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna, Victor Garber, and Denis O'Hare, Stephen Spinella

In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man to be voted into major public office in America. His victory was not just a victory for gay rights; he forged coalitions across the political spectrum. From senior citizens to union workers, Harvey Milk changed the very nature of what it means to be a fighter for human rights and became, before his untimely death in 1978, a hero for all Americans. (Focus Features)

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Dustin Lance Black
DIRECTED BY:	Gus Van Sant
RELEASE DATE:	Theatrical: November 26, 2008
RUNNING TIME:	128 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Sean Penn never tries to show Harvey Milk as a hero, and never needs to. He shows him as an ordinary man, kind, funny, flawed, shrewd, idealistic, yearning for a better world.

100

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

With Milk, a great San Francisco story becomes a great American story.

100

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

It's a total triumph, brimming with humor, heart, sexual heat, political provocation and a crying need to stir things up, just like Harvey did. If there's a better movie around this year, with more bristling purpose, I sure as hell haven't seen it.

100

TV Guide Perry Seibert

Harvey Milk embodied the concept that "all politics is personal," and by presenting the famed Mayor of Castro Street's personal and public lives with such clarity and empathy, Van Sant has made something very rare in Hollywood -- a genuinely powerful political film that works equally well as a story of personal triumph.

100

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel.

100

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.

100

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Smiling more than in all of his movies since "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" combined, Penn goes way deep and soulful in a highly ingratiating performance that's the one to beat for the Best Actor Oscar.

100

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

What makes Milk extraordinary isn't just that it's a nuanced, stirring portrait of one of the 20th century's most pivotal figures, but that it's also a nuanced, stirring portrait of the thousands of people he energized.

100

Slate Dana Stevens

Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black pull off something very close to magic. They make a film that's both historically precise and as graceful, unpredictable, and moving as a good fiction film--that is to say, a work of art.

100

Time Richard Corliss

Three decades ago, Milk and his ilk were able to enlist President Jimmy Carter and future President Ronald Reagan in the gay fight against Prop. 6. But this fall, Barack Obama was all but mute on Prop. 8. Some community organizers, like the President-elect, are more cautious than others. It's a shame Harvey Milk wasn't around to recruit him.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

A fascinating film -- more docudrama than biopic.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Though it's unflinching in its depiction of homosexual affection, the marvel of the movie is the dexterity with which it transcends the specificity of its characters and gay theme to be a universal human statement and profound political epic.

NPR Bob Mondello

What sets this film entertainingly apart from most civil-rights sagas, though, are a slew of relaxed, offhandedly persuasive performances, along with the flamboyance of hippie-era San Francisco.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

The film is superbly crafted, covering huge amounts of time, people and the zeitgeist without a moment of lapsed energy or inattention to detail.

The New Yorker David Denby

Milk is a rowdy anthem of triumph, brought to an abrupt halt by Milk's personal tragedies and the unfathomable moral chaos of Dan White.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Penn's Oscar-caliber transformation is breathtaking, and the saga of one man's fight for human rights is engrossing.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The story of Harvey Milk is a tragedy, but not since Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" has Sean Penn played such a serenely happy individual.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Milk feels like an important picture, but not in a way that makes it tedious to watch. There's no pretentious sheen to the proceedings.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.

Newsweek David Ansen

How you feel about Milk may depend on whether you've seen Rob Epstein's great, Oscar-winning 1984 documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk." Van Sant's movie lacks that film's shattering emotional impact. (Rage is not a color in the director's palette.) For those coming to Milk's story for the first time, however, this will be a rousing experience.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

More than acting, though, Penn's performance is a marvelous act of empathy in a movie that, for all its surprisingly conventional style, measures up to its stirring subject.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Milk is good enough, thanks mostly to Penn's uncanny evocation, to bring Harvey Milk alive as a vital and highly relevant figure, rather than a distant political abstraction or gay saint. (He very definitely was neither.)

Variety Todd McCarthy

Brolin's work is superlatively expressive of the inchoate impulses roiling inside his sorry character. But good as most of the cast is, the show belongs squarely to Penn.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Milk is so immediate that it's impossible to separate the movie's moment from this one.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

The deeply heartfelt Milk is more of a surface skim: a fairly standard biopic – if a very fine one, indeed – but never the transcendent work one would have hoped from the filmmaker or his subject.

Premiere Stuart Levine

Beyond Milk, few of the other characters are given much to do.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Milk is an agitprop fantasy about the selflessness of sainthood. If anybody but Penn was playing the saint, we'd probably feel as if we were being sold a bill of goods. Instead, he just about pulls it off. Such is the treachery of talent.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

As good as it is depicting his career, Milk doesn't fare quite as well as a portrait of the man himself.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

For its mesmerizing first two-thirds, Van Sant keeps the film tightly focused on his subject, superbly played by Penn and intimately shot, home-movie style, by Harris Savides. But when the director pulls back to detail Harvey Milk's fight against gay backlash, Milk gets derailed. And - dare I say it? - didactic.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's a testament to Van Sant's way with actors that the performances are better than the lines and that the film tugs undeniably at the heart as the awful finale falls. But a lack of poetry and freshness in the writing nags.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

A worthy docudrama that is solid if not sublime. But, sometimes, a merely good film can brush up against greatness, and this one does so twice – in Sean Penn's magnetic performance and in the cautionary tale's contemporary resonance.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

There's nothing terribly wrong with Milk, it's just that its celebration of a culture and a neighborhood, its valentine to the early days of gay rights activism, is mostly more conventional than compelling.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Milk is one of the most heartfelt portraits of a politician ever made--the man himself remains just out of reach.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Milk is steeped in the street-level details of acquiring and applying power, and a few early episodes show how clearly Milk understood the economic component.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

It's a little disappointing to see Van Sant dial back into mainstream respectability. Had he evoked Harvey Milk's life with the poetry that he did Kurt Cobain's, Milk might have been something special.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

The final result somehow undersells a man whose life and death were watershed moments in the gay rights movement.

The average user rating for this movie is 8.5 (out of 10) based on 53 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Chet B. gave it a6:
Liked it but I thought it was too safe, as if they didn't want to offend straights. What about the 1970s bath houses, what about the in-your-face sexuality? How could Harvey shrug off the suicide of his lover? Okay, a grand Hollywood epic making gays appealing to the heirs of Dan White. Necessary but not challenging in any way.

Adam gave it a10:
Milk is one of those rare movies that tries to be many things, and succeeds at all of them. This is a film that can provoke change, open eyes, and change lives. I know it changed mine.

Sean P. gave it a4:
Good acting, but predictable gay pride movie that we have too much of it "in our faces" of this genre today.

B C gave it a10:
Best film of the year. There have been a number of very good films this year, but this one is great. A story of courage and humanity. And moving story of civil rights.

Jack Miller gave it a9:
Having first visited San Francisco in 1976, and every year thereafter until I lived on Russian Hill the summer of 1980, I recall the transformation of Castro into a gay Mecca. I very well may have walked into that camera shop Harvey Milk and friends ran in '76 and '77. My favorite hang out was Cafe Flore, then and now, as well as the out and proud glass corner of the Twin Towers bar. The world we see in the film "Milk" is as authentic as it gets. The uncanny parallel of Prop 6 banning gay teachers, which Milk helped defeat, and the present day Prop 8 which passed despite Obama's stunning win in California is disturbing. But maybe instead of electoral victory, we need to be reminded that in a constitutional democracy that protects the rights of minorities, the court must come to the rescue when there is the tyranny of the majority denying the equality of a minority. The Supreme Court of California established this protection in the case of interracial marriage and so now must do the same, to be just, for same sex marriage. I want to add that more kudos should go to Diego Luna for his heart-rending performance as the doomed lover Jack Lira. The other major performances likewise deserve the praise given them.

Gina S. gave it a10:
An absolutely outstanding movie! Gus Van Sant, Sean Penn, James Franco and Josh Brolin all deserve Oscars for their work here. I saw the movie at the Castro Theater on opening weekend, just across the street from where Harvey's camera shop used to be. Many members of the audience personally knew the characters that the film depicts, and without exception, their sentiment was that it was very well done indeed. By the movie's tragic conclusion, most members of the audience were in tears, many sobbing out loud, uncontrollably. These were people who live with and suffer from the bigotry and discrimination that is prevalent towards the lgbt community even today, witness the passage of Prop. 8 in California.

DWilly gave it a5:
No, sorry, it's just a flat bio-pic, hitting all the numbers without shedding any light on character or the nature of the times. It's also strangely uninspiring. Maybe Van Sant feels the gay struggle so deeply he thought he could afford to tip the story to show Milk as a manipulative creep; and, while Penn is great and bold and all that, his performance is self-contained and doesn't call out to any kind of universality so you just watch it. Brolin is not good, and I'm a bit sick of this emperor of Hollywood royalty parading around without clothes.

Milk Focus Features

Milk
Focus Features