| Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures | Release Date: December 15, 2017 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
52
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Easily its most exciting iteration in decades — the first flat-out terrific “Star Wars” movie since 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back.” It seizes upon Lucas’ original dream of finding a pop vessel for his obsessions — Akira Kurosawa epics, John Ford westerns, science-fiction serials — and fulfills it with a verve and imagination all its own.
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RogerEbert.comDec 12, 2017
Writer/director Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a sprawling, incident- and character-packed extravaganza that picks up at the end of “Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens” and guides the series into unfamiliar territory. It’s everything a fan could want from a “Star Wars” film and then some.
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The movie is smart, stirring and deeply exciting, but more than anything, it is surprising. This is a Star Wars movie that plays with your assumptions and upends them, but it never betrays the story, characters and ethos at the series’ core. It expands the idea of what a Star Wars movie can be. It’ll knock you over.
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IndieWireDec 12, 2017
Under the fastidious guidance of writer-director Johnson, The Last Jedi turns the commercial restrictions of this behemoth into a Trojan horse for rapid-fire filmmaking trickery and narrative finesse. The result is the most satisfying entry in this bumpy franchise since “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980.
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What’s important in The Last Jedi is what happens to, and what we find out about, all of these characters along the way. In retrospect, The Force Awakens feels like a short introduction to these characters. After The Last Jedi, I feel like I’ve gone on a week-long road trip with them all.
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Yes, the latest “Star Wars” installment is here, and, lo, it is a satisfying, at times transporting entertainment. Remarkably, it has visual wit and a human touch, no small achievement for a seemingly indestructible machine that revved up 40 years ago and shows no signs of sputtering out (ever).
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The Force is, to me, still silly Star Wars mumbo jumbo, but Johnson finds a way to underscore it with humanity, with a classical Greek rumble of true pathos. On that front, The Last Jedi is a pure success, accessing the molten core of its drama and grappling with it in nuanced ways.
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The new movie truly passes the torch by making the next generation of Resistance heroes — Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), Poe (Oscar Isaac) and new addition, Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) — every bit as compelling as the old guard. Even more surprising, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) evolves from the whiny brat in “The Force Awakens” to a three-dimensional menace.
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There are images in this movie that provoke awe and delight, and creatures that feel lifted out of half-remembered childhood dreams. And though it briefly appears to lose steam in the middle, that’s short-lived, with a third act harboring sequences that feel like a maestro conducting a concerto the size of the cosmos.
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Huge, important things happen to characters secondary and primary. Surprises big and small abound. As is the case with all of the “Star Wars” films, where there is evil there is heroism, and where there is bravery there is sacrifice — and sometimes where there is love, there is heartbreak.
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If having pure fun at a “Star Wars” movie is wrong, I don’t want to be right. So for me, The Last Jedi falls right behind “The Empire Strikes Back” and maybe the original film in providing the thrills and the heartbreak, the heroism and villainy, and the romance and betrayal that makes these films such a treat even for those of us who can’t name all the planets or the alien species or even the Empire’s flunkies.
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By the rousing final act, Johnson has brought an apocalyptic grandeur to the lightsaber duels and airborne combat. His often-stirring addition to the saga finally lands on an affecting point about the importance of preserving essential cultural tradition without clinging too strictly to the dogma—and the texts—of the old way.
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Audiences will likely come away from The Last Jedi with a lot of complaints and questions. But they’re at least likely to feel they’re in the hands of someone who cares about the series as much as they do, someone who loves its history, but sees the wide-open future ahead of it as well.
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The Last Jedi checks off all the boxes you want from a Star Wars movie, including one of the coolest lightsaber fights in the series’ 40 years, but Johnson is also interested in exploring new territory, including a consideration of the shadings and nuances to the Light and Dark Sides of the Force.
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EmpireDec 12, 2017
The GuardianDec 12, 2017
The Last Jedi gives you an explosive sugar rush of spectacle. It’s a film that buzzes with belief in itself and its own mythic universe – a euphoric certainty that I think no other movie franchise has. And there is no provisional hesitation or energy dip of the sort that might have been expected between episodes seven and nine.
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the eighth movie in the series and one of the better ones. I’d rank it behind “The Empire Strikes Back” (still by far the best) and the first film, but it’s about on par with the enjoyable last episode, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which also awakened the long-moribund franchise.
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi unspools like a one-movie binge watch, a lively if overlong and busily plotted second chapter to the latest Star Wars trilogy that advances the story and deepens its characters with a combination of irreverent humor and worshipful love for the original text.
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These sequels trade directly on the emotional legacy of the originals (The Last Jedi makes some leaps into sentimental hyperspace, particularly in the way that it handles Fisher on-screen), and the more of the aged Luke and Leia we see, the more we chip away at the mythic power of characters as Lucas left them: Young, strong, immortal.
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Does the movie, like its predecessor, rely on familiar tropes a bit more than it should? Yes, I think it does. Is it, at a solid two-and-a-half hours, considerably longer than it needed to be? Yes, that too. But it’s still a pretty damn good movie, arguably the best the franchise has offered since Empire.
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Like many before it, The Last Jedi has already been hailed as the best Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back, and while that’s true, it’s too faint a compliment. It’s a film of genuine beauty, one where you come away as eager to talk about the set design and the choreography as you do the fate of the galaxy or what might happen next.
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Although The Last Jedi meets a relatively high standard for franchise filmmaking, Johnson’s effort is ultimately a disappointment. If anything, it demonstrates just how effective supervising producer Kathleen Kennedy and the forces that oversee this now Disney-owned property are at molding their individual directors’ visions into supporting a unified corporate aesthetic.
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Ridley, full of charming spunk playing a skeptical rebel recruit in The Force Awakens, is the biggest disappointment here. She is less engaging now that she is committed to the fight and plays most of the later action on a single note of earnest desperation; Johnson's script leaves her little else.
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Movie NationDec 12, 2017
Intentions and inspiration aside, Last Jedi doesn’t add up to an “Empire Strikes Back” for this trilogy. There’s no romance, little pathos and no real punch-in-the-gut moment. Its emotionally sterile tone was set with “The Force Awakens,” and that’s proven hard to shake, new innovations and plot twists aside.
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