This Must Be The Place Reviews
Daily Star
"It would take a week mucking out a pork pie factory to acclimatise for a hamfest as nauseating as this."
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
Radio Times
The movie's constituent elements are nearly always striking, yet somehow they never add up to anything that speaks clearly to the head or the heart.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Quickflix
This Must Be The Place is an ambitious experiment in form and tone, culminating in a precise failure... Like watching someone sprint into the ocean with the firm belief that they can make it to the other side before running out of breath.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Electric Sheep
A lot of it is terrific stuff, but there's just too much here to be digestible, too much to be resolved satisfactorily.
The Sunday Age
The film seems to be aiming for a whimsical flourish on an otherwise unpleasant subject. Its premiere at Cannes met with a mixed response. I remain underwhelmed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
The Skinny
[It's] made with all of the visual élan we've come to expect, but the pacing is leaden and the film lacks a sense of purpose.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Top CriticBizarre can be good when it's done deftly. In this case, however, it's done ponderously and sententiously.
East Bay Express
We begin to wonder why Penn even bothered with such a flimsy project in the first place. Let's not stop here very long.
Times-Picayune
As oddly magnetic as Sean Penn's performance is, the film seems more preoccupied with being quirky and puzzling than with telling a cohesive, satisfying story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Sean Penn as an ex-rock-star Nazi hunter feels like a lot to swallow. It is.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Urban Cinefile
The film's entire premise is highly self indulgent. Penn's performance, while striking and commendable, is overly mannered.. There's a mascara truckload of interest at work, but only an eyelash of satisfaction
Negotiating a consistent artistic path as steadily as a drunk walking a straight line, This Must Be the Place is all over the place dramatically, tonally and thematically.
Sean Penn has received a mantle's worth of humanitarian awards over the years. But he might have to give one of them back, just to make amends for "This Must Be the Place."
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The movie replaces emotional precision and intellectual honesty with syrupy sincerity and insistence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Movie Habit
Hits some wild notes but never quite finds its niche
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Penn has created a colorful tour guide, but in "This Must Be the Place," there's no there there.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Observer [UK]
Along the way there are occasional arresting images, but they prove minor compensations.
Boston Phoenix
[A] soggy, monumentally morose excuse for a movie ...
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Movieline
This Must Be the Place is a bewildering piece of work, a picture that may have initially been guided by a sweet impulse but takes a sharp left turn into crazytown.
JoBlo's Movie Emporium
Sean Penn's voice in this is like nails on a chalkboard, but it's fascinating in a bug-nuts kind of way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
