Van Sant brings a lyricism, a dreamy sensibility that infuses his detachment with sympathy. Last Days, which is informed by the suicide of Kurt Cobain, is a hauntingly beautiful tone poem.

| Mar 14, 2018

Last Days is a strange creature: it's an extremely abbreviated biopic with zero details, a tribute to a man and his music without a trace of his songs, a tragedy without an arc, etc. It's also dynamite artistry.

| Nov 19, 2013

A beguiling work of some beauty, this is a further move into a world of hypnotic, observational cinema for Gus Van Sant.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 2, 2005

While undeniably beautiful, it carries little more than the obvious voyeuristic appeal.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 30, 2005

It's unclear if Van Sant intends to inspire guilt; here, as elsewhere, he is exasperatingly abstruse. And in this striving to not say too much, he ends up not saying much of anything at all.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 14, 2005

A film about a junkie rock musician, played by Michael Pitt at his most narcissistic, doing nothing in particular for the better part of 97 minutes isn't my idea of either a good time or a serious endeavor.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 13, 2005

While Last Days succeeds as a nature documentary, Van Sant fails to penetrate human nature. The result is a portrait without a face.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 12, 2005

Last Days will cast a poetic spell on some viewers, as it did this one, and will seem mind-sappingly boring to others.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 12, 2005

Last Days is director Gus Van Sant's meditation on the death of Kurt Cobain, and an extraordinary meditation it is.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 12, 2005

Last Days offers some insight into Cobain's final frame of mind, but balks at the gates of deeper truth.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 12, 2005

Gus Van Sant ventures into the valley of death steering by an idiosyncratic compass and forsaking the aid of a conventional cinematic map.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 12, 2005

It's all terribly self-conscious and desperately arty and fairly bad.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Aug 12, 2005

Shot in long, single takes, the movie willfully tests your patience. You wish it would hurry up. Yet when it ends, it haunts you for a few days. (Well, me anyway.)

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 11, 2005

This movie, depending on what you do with it, can be boring, brilliant or both.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 11, 2005

If you're going to make a movie about Kurt Cobain, you might as well make a movie about Kurt Cobain.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 11, 2005

Van Sant uses Cobain's image for a portrait of physical and moral disintegration, but he also exhilarates us with his mastery of image and sound.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.4/5 | Aug 11, 2005

Sometimes we see Blake through the window, but, as he moves around the room, often we see nothing but the far wall. Depending on your perspective, this is either incredibly gutsy or incredibly boring.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 11, 2005

Last Days is a definitive record of death by gradual drug exhaustion. After the chills and thrills of Sid & Nancy and The Doors, here is a movie that sees how addicts usually die, not with a bang but a whimper.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 11, 2005

In putting the onus for meaning on viewers, Van Sant has pinned the film's success to our subjectivity. It might not guarantee fondness. Yet what an extraordinary collaboration it makes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 5, 2005

Last Days leaves a haunting impression of a man who, even at the height of his fame and adulation, was hiding in plain sight.

| Aug 5, 2005