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Milk
Focus Features


8.0

based on 38 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 125 votes
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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Film Threat Scott Mendelson

A fine character study and a solid look at a specific political movement and a certain time and place.

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 8.0 (out of 10) based on 125 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Orietta gave it a10:
Nothing less than wonderful!

Harvey M. gave it a2:
This movie wasn't even about milk!! I saw no cows or farms or even farmers!! i hated it.

Joe W. gave it a10:
I liked the historical documentary-like pieces, lacing reality with Hollywood movie for a final movie. Sean Penn was excellent and the other actors and actress were fantastic. A PHENOMENOM worthy of an award.

Enrique gave it a9:
Truthful, sober, very well done biopic. Great reconstruction of he 70's. Excellent acting by the whole cast.

Douglas R. gave it a7:
Extraordinary, (if hamstrung by the writer and director) performance by sean penn.... excellent support work all 'round as well.. but, as sympathetic as i am to the cause ("some of my best friends", etc., HUGELY aniti-prop 8), why was this movie populated, entirely, by such "muted" gays? where was the odd screaming queen? i mean, it WAS san fran in the seventies, no? all too stately a film ultimately, but still certainly better than most of the drek available these days.

CommandoDude gave it a6:
The reason I rated this movie so low, is because it is a movie I would not like to watch a second time. Now. It was very dramatic, and at times...humorous, but only at times. I didn't like it because it had FAR too much gay stuff in it then was needed. Lots of guy kissing, and naked men. I do not want to see that. Humor was lost on most of the time in favor of this epic but not-so epic struggle against oppression. I feel Milk could have been a lot better then it was.

David H gave it a3:
This is basically a boring gay propaganda film. The only redeeming value is an excellent performance by Penn, also there was a bit of historical value.

Milk Focus Features

Milk
Focus Features