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Reviews Counted:17
Fresh:15
Rotten:2
Average Rating:7.2/10
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.
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,... [More]
Starring: Timothy Spall, Juliet Stevenson, Eddie Marsan, James Corden
Director: Adrian Shergold
The key to the film is in the performances by Spall and Stevenson -- and by Marsan. The utter averageness of the characters, their lack of insight, their normality, contrasts with the subject matter in an unsettling way.
Top CriticGrim and disturbing yet perversely riveting.
Top CriticThe movie grows more compelling in the latter half as British public opinion turns against capital punishment and Pierrepoint begins to have his own doubts.
Top CriticThe very title of this movie seems to message its doom. What could possibly be dramatic enough about Britain's last hangman to carry our interest over a 90-minute film? A whole lot, it turns out.
Top Critic[The film's] grittiness instantly adds to the historically and socio-economically convincing picture of working-class Yorkshire in the last century.
Top CriticVery much a bookend to Vera Drake in its mixture of post war British reserve and ugly reality. [Actor] Spall makes it work, creating a little man with big and terrible secrets.
Top CriticIt's Timothy Spall who really carries the film.
Top CriticYou have to wonder just how true to life the melodramatic depiction of these events is.
Top CriticWhether the real Pierrepoint, who died in 1992, had a clear conscience, the portly Spall creates the perfect impression of a quietly decent, proud man who is overwhelmed by unwanted celebrity and by one too many jerking ropes.
Top CriticAs this sad, shambling antihero swings from one pole to the other on the issue of capital punishment, you are inclined to follow every step of the way toward his tragic enlightenment.
Top CriticThis measured bio-production might be viewed as a lesser companion piece to Vera Drake -- although in the case of Pierrepoint, all the period-piece tastefulness makes for a story more instructive than emotionally tangible.
Top CriticPierrepoint turns a morbid subject into a fascinating case study of the last official prison executioner in England. The result is both a balanced, carefully researched film and a thoughtful, reflective treatise on capital punishment.
Top CriticPierrepoint is worth seeing for Shergold’s attention to process and for all the ghoulish details.
Top CriticAt once desperately grim and unnervingly gripping, providing an exacting sense of the detail and procedure that went into death by hanging.
Top CriticThe 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.
Top CriticShergold 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.
Top CriticDark but absorbing.
Top Critic
May 31, 2007:
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