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Milk
Focus Features
FILM:
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: |
DVD: March 10, 2009
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.
91
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
A fascinating film -- more docudrama than biopic.
91
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.
90
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.
90
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.
90
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.
88
USA Today
Claudia Puig
Penn's Oscar-caliber transformation is breathtaking, and the saga of one man's fight for human rights is engrossing.
88
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.
88
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.
88
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.
88
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
Whatever you think of gay people (or politicians), you may find the movie compelling viewing.
80
Empire
Colin Kennedy
Milk thoroughly deserves all of the press ink that will doubtless be spilt over it. Wear your 'Vote Penn' Oscar pin with pride.
80
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.
80
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.
80
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.)
80
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.
80
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
Milk is so immediate that it's impossible to separate the movie's moment from this one.
78
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.
75
Premiere
Stuart Levine
Beyond Milk, few of the other characters are given much to do.
75
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.
75
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.
75
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.
75
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.
75
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.
70
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.
70
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.
70
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.
70
Film Threat
Scott Mendelson
A fine character study and a solid look at a specific political movement and a certain time and place.
67
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.
60
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 7.8 (out of 10) based on 148 User Votes
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