Milk
Focus Features | Release Date: November 26, 2008 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
83
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 39 Critic Reviews
Positive:
37
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Sean Penn never tries to show Harvey Milk as a hero, and never needs to. He shows him as an ordinary man, kind, funny, flawed, shrewd, idealistic, yearning for a better world. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
With Milk, a great San Francisco story becomes a great American story. Read full review
100
Rolling StonePeter Travers
It's a total triumph, brimming with humor, heart, sexual heat, political provocation and a crying need to stir things up, just like Harvey did. If there's a better movie around this year, with more bristling purpose, I sure as hell haven't seen it. Read full review
100
TV Guide MagazinePerry Seibert
Harvey Milk embodied the concept that "all politics is personal," and by presenting the famed Mayor of Castro Street's personal and public lives with such clarity and empathy, Van Sant has made something very rare in Hollywood -- a genuinely powerful political film that works equally well as a story of personal triumph. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most. Read full review
100
New York PostLou Lumenick
Smiling more than in all of his movies since "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" combined, Penn goes way deep and soulful in a highly ingratiating performance that's the one to beat for the Best Actor Oscar. Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
What makes Milk extraordinary isn't just that it's a nuanced, stirring portrait of one of the 20th century's most pivotal figures, but that it's also a nuanced, stirring portrait of the thousands of people he energized. Read full review
100
SlateDana Stevens
Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black pull off something very close to magic. They make a film that's both historically precise and as graceful, unpredictable, and moving as a good fiction film--that is to say, a work of art.
100
TimeRichard Corliss
Three decades ago, Milk and his ilk were able to enlist President Jimmy Carter and future President Ronald Reagan in the gay fight against Prop. 6. But this fall, Barack Obama was all but mute on Prop. 8. Some community organizers, like the President-elect, are more cautious than others. It's a shame Harvey Milk wasn't around to recruit him. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
A fascinating film -- more docudrama than biopic. Read full review
91
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
Though it's unflinching in its depiction of homosexual affection, the marvel of the movie is the dexterity with which it transcends the specificity of its characters and gay theme to be a universal human statement and profound political epic. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
The film is superbly crafted, covering huge amounts of time, people and the zeitgeist without a moment of lapsed energy or inattention to detail. Read full review
90
The New YorkerDavid Denby
Milk is a rowdy anthem of triumph, brought to an abrupt halt by Milk's personal tragedies and the unfathomable moral chaos of Dan White. Read full review
90
NPRBob Mondello
What sets this film entertainingly apart from most civil-rights sagas, though, are a slew of relaxed, offhandedly persuasive performances, along with the flamboyance of hippie-era San Francisco. Read full review
88
USA TodayClaudia Puig
Penn's Oscar-caliber transformation is breathtaking, and the saga of one man's fight for human rights is engrossing. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
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. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
Milk feels like an important picture, but not in a way that makes it tedious to watch. There's no pretentious sheen to the proceedings. Read full review
88
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch. Read full review
88
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
Whatever you think of gay people (or politicians), you may find the movie compelling viewing. Read full review
80
VarietyTodd McCarthy
Brolin's work is superlatively expressive of the inchoate impulses roiling inside his sorry character. But good as most of the cast is, the show belongs squarely to Penn. Read full review
80
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
Milk is so immediate that it's impossible to separate the movie's moment from this one. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
More than acting, though, 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. Read full review
80
NewsweekDavid Ansen
How you feel about Milk may depend on whether you've seen Rob Epstein's great, Oscar-winning 1984 documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk." Van Sant's movie lacks that film's shattering emotional impact. (Rage is not a color in the director's palette.) For those coming to Milk's story for the first time, however, this will be a rousing experience. Read full review
80
EmpireColin Kennedy
Milk thoroughly deserves all of the press ink that will doubtless be spilt over it. Wear your 'Vote Penn' Oscar pin with pride. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleKimberley Jones
The deeply heartfelt Milk is more of a surface skim: a fairly standard biopic – if a very fine one, indeed – but never the transcendent work one would have hoped from the filmmaker or his subject. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
It's a testament to Van Sant's way with actors that the performances are better than the lines and that the film tugs undeniably at the heart as the awful finale falls. But a lack of poetry and freshness in the writing nags. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
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 – in Sean Penn's magnetic performance and in the cautionary tale's contemporary resonance. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
As good as it is depicting his career, Milk doesn't fare quite as well as a portrait of the man himself. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
For its mesmerizing first two-thirds, Van Sant keeps the film tightly focused on his subject, superbly played by Penn and intimately shot, home-movie style, by Harris Savides. But when the director pulls back to detail Harvey Milk's fight against gay backlash, Milk gets derailed. And - dare I say it? - didactic. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
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. Read full review
75
PremiereStuart Levine
Beyond Milk, few of the other characters are given much to do. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
Milk is one of the most heartfelt portraits of a politician ever made--the man himself remains just out of reach. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
There's nothing terribly wrong with Milk, it's just that its celebration of a culture and a neighborhood, its valentine to the early days of gay rights activism, is mostly more conventional than compelling. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
Milk is steeped in the street-level details of acquiring and applying power, and a few early episodes show how clearly Milk understood the economic component. Read full review
70
Film ThreatScott Mendelson
A fine character study and a solid look at a specific political movement and a certain time and place. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
It's a little disappointing to see Van Sant dial back into mainstream respectability. Had he evoked Harvey Milk's life with the poetry that he did Kurt Cobain's, Milk might have been something special. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsJoe Neumaier
The final result somehow undersells a man whose life and death were watershed moments in the gay rights movement. Read full review
40
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
I can admire the professional flexibility that leads Van Sant from slow-motion, half-experimental works like "Paranoid Park" or "Last Days" to an inspirational, Oscar-season package like Milk, but I wish he could split the difference between his two modes more effectively. Read full review
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