The Last Duel
Twentieth Century Fox | Release Date: October 15, 2021 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
67
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 50 Critic Reviews
Positive:
34
Mixed:
15
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleOct 11, 2021
The Last Duel, directed by Ridley Scott, gives us the texture of life in 14th century France, so much so that we feel that we are there, in this place that’s desperate and foreign and yet human and familiar. Read full review
100
ConsequenceClint WorthingtonOct 8, 2021
The Last Duel is a testament to male self-delusion and self-mythologizing, and the impact it has on the women around them. Read full review
91
Original-CinThom ErnstOct 13, 2021
Scott contrives a convincing resemblance to events leading up to the last court-sanctioned duel-to-the-death with a meticulous eye for specifics. He transfers a riveting piece of history into a riveting film—mostly. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleMatthew MonagleOct 14, 2021
The Last Duel is a thematic gold mine, one that sits nicely alongside some of Scott’s best work to date. Read full review
88
Paste MagazineBrianna ZiglerOct 15, 2021
Ridley Scott directing a grand, riveting medieval epic that doubles as an analysis of gender dynamics might be unexpected, but The Last Duel manages to effortlessly combine Scott’s action sensibilities with an empathetic thread between the past and present. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperOct 12, 2021
Nothing about The Last Duel is subtle. Just about everything about The Last Duel is brutally effective. Read full review
84
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzOct 12, 2021
By the time Marguerite’s chapter concludes, laying bare the wrenching source of the story’s tensions, The Last Duel will have you in the palm of its calloused hand, whether you like it or not. It is as ambitious and memorable and impressively messy a storytelling experiment as major-studio films come these days. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattOct 8, 2021
Duel is entirely, often sensationally watchable without ever quite justifying why it needs to remind us what the world has done to women for centuries. Read full review
83
IndieWireBen CrollSep 10, 2021
The Last Duel reveals itself as something all too rare on the current Hollywood field of battle: an intelligent and genuinely daring big budget melee that is — above all else — the product of recognizable artistic collaboration. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriOct 15, 2021
The Last Duel is full of incident and historical detail, and its universe is a complicated one — but it seems the script, by its very nature, has ingeniously done all the necessary underlining for us. Even as it pretends to add complexity and context, it simplifies and focuses. Read full review
80
The New York TimesManohla DargisOct 14, 2021
The movie is weirdly entertaining, but the world it presents, despite its flourishes of comedy, is cold, hard and unforgiving. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangOct 14, 2021
A willingness to subvert expectations is one reason this ungainly, ingenious and altogether fascinating collaboration works as well as it does. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinOct 13, 2021
The Last Duel, which was adapted from a non-fiction book by Eric Jager, is a knotty, stimulating drama with a piquant #MeToo edge and the heft and splendour of an old-school historical epic. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeOct 13, 2021
A rare historical epic that is connected to contemporary crises. Read full review
80
The AtlanticDavid SimsOct 13, 2021
Scott has long made movies about how systems of power exist to serve only the powerful, from the faceless corporations of Alien to the indifferent cops of Thelma and Louise. As The Last Duel rumbles to its bloody conclusion and its two leading men clash, it’s clear that the filmmaker’s allegiance lies elsewhere. Read full review
80
SlashfilmMarshall ShafferSep 11, 2021
Ultimately, Scott knows when to let the script beguile the mind and when to let the action dazzle the eyes. Read full review
80
Total FilmJames MottramSep 10, 2021
Scott’s usual scope and scale meet unreliable narrators for a thought-provoking tale of systematic abuse. In a classy cast, Comer shines brightest. Read full review
80
IGNRyan LestonSep 10, 2021
The Last Duel’s staggering trial by combat allows for some brilliant performances, brutal fights, and impactful social commentary. Read full review
75
Film ThreatRob RectorOct 24, 2021
Despite periodic bursts of action, The Last Duel has a long wick that burns slowly toward its violent conclusion. It’s a wisely protracted take from writers Affleck, Damon, and Nicole Holofcener that allows the audience to consume its narrative details as well as its performances and Scott’s stirring visuals. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliOct 18, 2021
Those expecting an action film may be disappointed by what The Last Duel offers. While the climactic battle is rousing, suspenseful, and suitably brutal, the majority of the film is more about dialogue, perception, and character interaction. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayOct 14, 2021
The Last Duel is an entertaining movie, even an intriguing one. But audiences might be forgiven for thinking, upon leaving the theater, that they’ve just been very nobly and very honorably mansplained. Read full review
75
The Seattle TimesSoren AndersenOct 13, 2021
Director Ridley Scott, who knows a thing or two about how to mount sweeping historical epics (see “Gladiator”), is in his element here. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Oct 13, 2021
The setting may be the 14th century, but this is very much a historical drama of modern concerns. Damningly, it suggests that yesterday’s injustices remain very much today’s. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyOct 12, 2021
While Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven throbbed with purposeful vitality, pictures such as Robin Hood and 1492: Conquest of Paradise seemed to lack much of a reason for being. Scott’s The Last Duel may not be perfect but it never exhibits such inertia. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJake CoyleOct 12, 2021
The movie, written by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener, is not the tale of manly valor that it first appears. The Last Duel is more like a medieval tale deconstructed, piece by piece, until its heavily armored male characters and the genre’s mythologized nobility are unmasked. Read full review
75
The Film StageEthan VestbyOct 12, 2021
While it’s not a wholly interesting or original idea to take battling machismo to task by stripping violence of catharsis, The Last Duel—at least in the brutality of its eventual climax—achieves strong emotional blunt force. A sign that its lightly boring morality play and history lesson before the very pre-determined destination was worth the time. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineChris BarsantiOct 10, 2021
Ridley Scott’s medieval saga insightfully revels in the complexities of its competing storylines. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreOct 8, 2021
Scott and his collaborators find the ugly human foibles underneath the armor, court finery and gowns and make this story from an age when the one percent had the power of life and death over everyone else, when women were literally “property,” topical and timely. Read full review
75
The PlaylistJessica KiangSep 10, 2021
It’s really rather heartening that Affleck, Damon, and Driver are all on such good form in betraying their gender to this degree, as they conspire in illustrating, in a fun, undemanding, slickly made way, how men are now and have always been, the absolute fucking worst. Read full review
70
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiOct 15, 2021
A tale of power and misogyny masquerading as honor, the film is engaging and occasionally funny, embracing its themes despite a narrative imbalance. Read full review
70
Vanity FairRichard LawsonOct 13, 2021
The Last Duel is a surprising jumble, a motley assemblage of tones that often work in perverse harmony. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzOct 11, 2021
Comer makes Margeurite believably vulnerable and strong, haunting at times. But it’s not clear that the film is improved by the competing narratives. Marguerite’s version probably would have sufficed. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 10, 2021
Ultimately, The Last Duel is the affecting story of one woman’s quiet heroism that requires you to wade through a lot of blustery accounts of the honor, the pride and the wars of men in order to get to it. Which is kind of like perpetuating the patriarchy. Read full review
65
TheWrapAsher LubertoSep 10, 2021
Adapting Eric Jager’s 2004 non-fiction book with screenwriters Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener, Scott spins a medieval yarn that is by turns gruesome, grotesque, gorgeous and inconsistent. Read full review
60
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyOct 23, 2021
The Last Duel is perfectly engrossing as a slice of historical intrigue, a clash of iron wills and iron swords, all muddied on the battlefields of medieval France. But there’s a tendency here for the film to present basic facts about contemporary gender politics as some earth-shattering revelation. Read full review
60
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeOct 17, 2021
Despite a spirited performance from Comer and an impressive roster of supporting turns (including a scene-stealing Harriet Walter as Jean’s withering mother, Nicole), The Last Duel has a tendency to mirror its central battle’s attempts to address complex issues with the blunt tool of rabble-rousing spectacle. Read full review
60
CNNBrian LowryOct 14, 2021
A "Rashomon"-like tale that tells its story from different perspectives, this fact-based adaptation of Eric Jager's book is muddy, bloody and grim but too drawn out in filtering 14th-century feudal norms through a modern prism. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawOct 14, 2021
Though flawed, its old-fashioned movie-making energy commands attention as well as its ingenious, if overextended three-act Rashomon structure, retelling the same story from three different standpoints, mostly without insisting on tricksy discrepancies. Read full review
60
SlateDana StevensOct 13, 2021
If Affleck and Driver at times appear to be on loan from a different, dopier movie, possibly one involving Monty Python, they both have such a cape-swooshing, mustache-twirling good time that it’s hard to blame them for going all in on their characters’ villainy. Read full review
60
EmpireDan JolinOct 11, 2021
It’s not the kind of historical drama you might expect from Ridley Scott, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And if its threefold perspective tests the patience, it at least gives the right character the final word. Read full review
60
Time OutPhil de SemlyenSep 27, 2021
The big challenge for The Last Duel is to depict a world in which women are marginalised and disempowered without doing the same thing to its female characters. Maybe it should have ceded more of its cold stone floor to Marguerite. Read full review
60
VarietyOwen GleibermanSep 10, 2021
Despite a brief action interlude here or there, The Last Duel turns out to be a lavishly convoluted and, at times, rather interesting medieval soap opera. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternOct 14, 2021
The Last Duel is often ponderous, and no wonder, given its ambitious but erratic script. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyOct 14, 2021
The best thing about The Last Duel is its very handsome look, courtesy of Scott’s go-to cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski. Read full review
50
Little White LiesRafaela Sales RossOct 14, 2021
The film feeds into the very power structure it sets out to debunk, a frustrating miss that threatens to cloud Comer’s poignant performance. Read full review
40
The New YorkerRichard BrodyOct 18, 2021
The most disturbing and dissonant aspect of The Last Duel involves the filming of the sexual crime at its center. Read full review
40
Rolling StoneDavid FearOct 13, 2021
The experience is not Rashomon Redux so much as enduring a bad rash. Read full review
40
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganSep 10, 2021
Whether it’s the sheer weight of the narrative repetition - which involves rewatching a brutal rape - or the two-men/one-woman perspective, which results in an underwritten character and a strained performance from Comer, The Last Duel is crushed by the weight of its own armour. Read full review
40
The GuardianJonathan RomneySep 10, 2021
An all-star cast and some showstoppingly horrible hair can’t save Ridley Scott’s medieval epic. Read full review
25
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiOct 14, 2021
Degreasing a stove is a more enjoyable way to spend your Saturday night. Read full review
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