The Last Station Reviews
Top CriticLiterature lasts, but sometimes, The Last Station suggests, the ties that bind last, too.
| Original Score: 3/4
Some critics have derided the central performances as scenery-chewing excess, but these Tolstoys are characters who demand histrionics, and Mirren and Plummer are magnificent in delivering on those demands.
The Last Station is a moving, fictionalized account of a piece of real Russian history, a tour de force for an actor who's in his prime in his 70s and 80s, and a real return to form for a director most at home in period pieces.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Engaging performers all, but the movie's superficial flummery is slightly exasperating when the true-life events would have provided an even richer palette of ideas.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Director and writer Michael Hoffman, adapting Jay Parini's novel, lets the history play out, and this little-known chapter plays out nicely indeed.
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| Original Score: B
Acted beautifully by a cast you never want to take your eyes off, so as not to miss a tiny nuance.
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| Original Score: 3/4
If you come to this expecting the philosophical depth and psychological detail of Tolstoy's work you're sure to be disappointed, but as an actors' romp it's delectable.
If the operatic emotional pitch ultimately proves unsustainable (not to mention tiresome), the film is full of captivating details.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
An actor can be 80 years old, but give him fake whiskers and a pair of heavy boots, and he'll stomp through a two-hour movie like a happy kid.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A fun, sexy romp about the last days of Leo Tolstoy? Believe it.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Michael Hoffman's adaptation of the Jay Parini novel is a most affecting look at the twilight of a marriage and how its parties adapt to the dawn of a new era.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The movie's a chocolate box of nougaty performances, from Christopher Plummer's delightful depiction of Tolstoy as a ribald old naïf to Paul Giamatti twirling his waxed mustache and playing to the gallery as Vladimir Chertkov...
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Tansforms Tolstoy's waning days into material worthy of one of his tragedies while simultaneously making a biting statement about how the politics of a "movement" often warp the underlying philosophy which caused it to develop.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Mirren and Plummer make Leo and Sofya Tolstoy more vital than you might expect in a historical picture.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Despite its literary pedigree, this stagy production mixes ribaldry and campy overacting.
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| Original Score: 2.0/4.0
Isn't all that it should be, but whenever these two actors are onscreen, it's like a great night at the theater.
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| Original Score: a-
The story's a bit of a bore, but the cast is terrific.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Helen Mirren outdoes even her Oscar-winning performance in The Queen.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A lovely quicksilver version of literary history, with the accent on young love that emerges unbidden, and old love that endures.
The movie has its evocative moments, but it's so rigged on the side of anti-intellectualism that you'd never guess that Tolstoy's late work inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
It just feel like a lifeless costume drama.
The arrival of a movie with as much intelligence and artistry as The Last Station should also be accompanied by the sound of trumpets.
It's the most emotionally naked work of Mirren's movie career; she gives poetic form to the madness and the violence of commonplace jealousy.
Though all the actors try to expand their underwritten roles, Mirren is most successful.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The kind of movie that gives literature a bad name. Not because it undermines the dignity of a great writer and his work, but because it is so self-consciously eager to flaunt its own gravity and good taste.
| Original Score: 2/5
The Last Station slides gracefully between comedy and pathos (it aims for tragedy, but doesn't quite get there).
For those who enjoy actors who can play it up without ever overplaying their hands, The Last Station is the destination of choice.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Helen Mirren is a lusty, roaring wonder playing, of all things, the long-suffering wife of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer in peak form).
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| Original Score: 3/4
Every second Helen Mirren is on-screen in The Last Station is a study in peerless talent.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The message is clear, if you didn't get it from the rich acting: This is a film to celebrate nature and life.
Based on the equally entertaining, erudite novel by Jay Parini and adapted and directed by Michael Hoffman, the movie is at once a hot marital showdown and a cool political debate, a domestic War and Peace.
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| Original Score: B+
This workmanlike adaptation of Jay Parini's novel about Tolstoy's last days, adapted and directed by Michael Hoffman, settles into a lushly scenic television drama, though with dialogue strangely located somewhere in the 1950s.
Michael Hoffman's biopic of Leo Tolstoy's final year filters its historical drama through a turgid coming-of-age experience.
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| Original Score: 2/5
