the end result feels like business as usual done by-the-book.
Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman (2007)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:50
Fresh:38
Rotten:12
Average Rating:7/10
Consensus: Director Adrian Shergold doesn't shy away from the darker elements of the movie's subject, and Timothy Spall is mesmerizing as the title character.
Rated: R [See Full Rating] for disturbing images, nudity and brief sexuality
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Jun 1, 2007 Limited
Synopsis: Timothy Spall (Professor Pettigrew from the Harry Potter movies) gives a magnificently multilayered performance as the protagonist in PIERREPOINT: THE LAST HANGMAN. Spall plays Albert Pierrepoint,... Timothy Spall (Professor Pettigrew from the Harry Potter movies) gives a magnificently multilayered performance as the protagonist in PIERREPOINT: THE LAST HANGMAN. Spall plays Albert Pierrepoint, a grocery deliveryman who decides to apply for his father's old job--a hangman for the British courts. Soon he is perfecting the execution procedure, fulfilling his duties in record time and with no problems whatsoever. Though proud of his success, Pierrepoint prefers to keep it to himself, not even telling his wife, Anne (Juliet Stevenson), what he does when he leaves the house for days at a time. But when General Montgomery himself (Clive Francis) asks Pierrepoint to execute dozens of Nazis who have been sentenced to death, for the first time Pierrepoint starts questioning what he does, and soon his relatively calm, quiet world is turned upside down. Based on a true story, PIERREPOINT: THE LAST HANGMAN is a gripping period drama, bathed in grays by cinematographer Danny Cohen and production designer Candida Otton. Spall is mesmerizing as Pierrepoint, his slow walk and penetrating eyes filling the screen. Stevenson is excellent as his loyal wife, standing by him through thick and thin. PIERREPOINT is directed with careful precision by Adrian Shergold, a longtime actor and television director who trained at the feet of Mike Leigh, who has cast Spall in many of his own films. And Eddie Marsan excels as Tish, a compatriot of Pierrepoint's who lands himself in a very nasty bit of trouble. [More]
Starring: Timothy Spall, Juliet Stevenson, Eddie Marsan, James Corden
Starring: Timothy Spall, Juliet Stevenson, Eddie Marsan, James Corden, Christopher Fulford, Tobias Menzies, Tim Woodward
Director: Adrian Shergold
Director: Adrian Shergold
Screenwriter: Bob Mills, Jeff Pope
Producer: Christine Langan
Composer: Martin Phipps
Studio: IFC Films
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Reviews for Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman
Somewhere in this true story lies a grand statement about what taking lives for a living really does to a person’s moral compass. [Director] Adrian Shergold never quite finds it; his film dutifully recounts the facts but only skims the surface.
The actors' understated performances, coupled with an underwritten screenplay, ultimately leave the audience dangling.
Reaches for complexity but ends up, as you’d expect from a partnership with Masterpiece Theater, rendering Pierrepoint palatable as a decent, principled chap who was just doing his job.
The filmmakers fall through their own trapdoor, using the hangman's story to fashion a preachy anti-capital punishment message movie that seems at odds with the man himself.
Shergold can't quite pull off tricky balancing act between understated working-class poetic miserablism, in the manner of acknowledged exemplar Vera Drake, and an issue-based melodrama's demands for a flashy third-act.
This recounting of Pierrepoint's rise and fall proves mostly a schematic message movie.
Handsomely crafted and well-acted, but its sense of scale is as constricted as a noose.
Albert Pierrepoint single-handedly killed over 450 people in his career, dispatching most of them with an icy precision in less than 30 seconds.
You have to wonder just how true to life the melodramatic depiction of these events is.
In the wrong hands this could have been capital punishment, but as a low key drama about one man's unique approach to life and other people's deaths, it's actually just, er, capital.
A genuine and skillful account of one of Britain's most morally ambiguous working-class characters.
Pierrepoint is worth seeing for Shergold’s attention to process and for all the ghoulish details.
...there's little doubt that the film will work just as well on the small screen as it does in theaters.
Handles capitol punishment in a similar way that "Vera Drake" tackled the abortion issue ... allows Timothy Spall's resplendent dramatic chops to shine.
The shocker near the end is one of the more heartbreaking pieces of cinema in quite a while.
An emotionally powerful drama about the dirty business of capital punishment.
The movie hits its message a little too emphatically, and its narrative unwinds a little too schematically. But Spall's performance, along with that of Juliet Stevenson as his devoted and sometimes credulous spouse, keeps things grounded.
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May 31, 2007:
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