Milk Reviews
Top Critic
Sean Penn gives a meticulously detailed performance as the cagey and charismatic pol, but credit should also go to Dustin Lance Black, whose script squarely locates Milk at the center of his community, his city, and his cause.
The story is sad, but the mood is jubilant and the energy relentless.
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| Original Score: 5/6
Perhaps it is simply an accident of timing that puts Milk in theaters at this moment. But fate or simple fortunate timing, Milk arrives as one of the best films of 2008.
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| Original Score: 5/5
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.
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.
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| Original Score: B
This film wants us to understand both how far we've come as a society and that it is still not far enough.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Once in a while, a movie arrives at such a perfect moment, its message and meaning so finely tuned to the current zeitgeist, that it seems less a cinematic event than a cosmic convergence, willed into being by a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the stars.
Milk is so immediate that it's impossible to separate the movie's moment from this one.
Milk has one of the finest ensemble casts this year and a magnificent, career-topping performance by Sean Penn, who disappears into the title role.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The film understandably and movingly centres itself on Penn's portrayal of a hedonist-turned-activist who discovered that in order to change his world, he had to find his voice.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
What the film lacks in daring narrative it makes up for with its electric portrayal of its radical subject.
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| Original Score: 4/6
Van Sant's film (and why did it take 24 years after the documentary to make this stirring, heartbreaking story a feature film?) finally gives Milk his due -- and becomes an immediate classic of gay cinema.
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| Original Score: 4/4
It's nice to see Penn play a character of Spicoli-like sweetness and openness, rather than the glowering lugs that have become his specialty.
I don't know that this is Penn's best performance, overall -- let's have that debate some other time -- but as far as the mannered, immersive impersonations of his later career go, Harvey Milk takes the cake.
Milk represents a thought provoking, cathartic, and mostly true tale of politics and courage.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The final result somehow undersells a man whose life and death were watershed moments in the gay rights movement.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Penn is one of our great actors, and his greatness comes from small things. Close your eyes and listen to how he absolutely gets -- but doesn't caricature -- Milk's honking Long Island accent.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Penn goes way deep and soulful in a highly ingratiating performance that's the one to beat for the Best Actor Oscar.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Somehow, Milk implants hope in those who've lost it. Somehow, Penn plays him as a feisty charmer so winning and lifelike that you'll regard him as a friend before it's over.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Milk is 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.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Progress is slow, but Harvey Milk was one of the first to set the wheels in motion. He more than deserves a movie this good.
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| Original Score: B+
At the heart of this eloquent portrait of a cultural catalyst is Penn's profoundly human, and possibly finest, performance.
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| Original Score: 4/4
It's a reminder, in this age of virtual flash and computer-generated wonders, of the power of simple human expression.
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| Original Score: A
What's surprising about Milk is how much creative fun Van Sant has under the serious circumstances.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Penn is so engaging, physically loose and just plain smart in the title role, he's bound to top everyone's shortlist come awards time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
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.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Milk was murdered 30 years ago. The exceptional The Times of Harvey Milk won the Oscar for Best Documentary 24 years ago.... Yet, all this time later... Hollywood wants us to applaud its courage for finally--finally--telling this story?
Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. And Milk is a marvel.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
The film is a passionate history lesson, a broadside in favor of gay rights and the engaging story of one flawed but courageous man.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
[An] incisive and stirring dramatization of Harvey Milk's heroic life and violent death.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Van Sant works from a script by Dustin Lance Black to tell Milk's story clearly and forcefully.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
With the combination of Van Sant's direction and Penn's masterful performance, it's moving, and important, as well.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
With Milk, a great San Francisco story becomes a great American story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The film hits all the important marks but never feels like a typical biopic, a superficial, greatest-hits collection.
A very powerful film that's really relevant to what is going on in the world today.
Giving himself utterly to the role, Penn takes an actor's craft and dedication to soulful heights, making a demand for dignity that becomes universal.
Milk is one of the most heartfelt portraits of a politician ever made -- the man himself remains just out of reach.
It's a lengthy, engaging, information-packed tribute to an early activist who dedicated the last years of his life to gay rights before it was fashionable, and paid the ultimate price for his passion.
The first great film to look at civil rights from the perspective of the gay movement.
An adroitly and tenderly observed account of the life of Harvey Milk.
