Is Penn actually comparing the "brutality" of civil war in Africa to the "brutality" of personal relationships among Western professionals?

| Feb 11, 2021

While not a perfect film, there is a passion that comes forth when viewing The Last Face as a whole, a passion of a director that is infectious.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 30, 2019

Theron and Penn are both deeply committed to these causes in real life. However, the film's bumbling mix of drippy romance, fetishized violence and self-serving sermonizing in a context-deficient void only makes a mockery of that commitment.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Oct 15, 2019

The Last Face sheds light on the lives of those who actually deserve the attention.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 16, 2019

A cringe-inducing, self-serving mess. There's a good film in the subject matter somewhere, but Sean Penn is absolutely not the person to find it. Avoid.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 3, 2019

"The Last Face" is the worst kind of good-intentioned noble failure, one that muddles its message because it tries too hard to tell it.

| Nov 17, 2017

[A] tortuous misstep for director Sean Penn

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Oct 6, 2017

A proselytizing, pretentious bore.

| Original Score: 2.5/10 | Aug 25, 2017

Penn's pompous indulgence is gruesome and gravely disappointing.

| Original Score: 3/10 | Aug 14, 2017

This romantic war drama -- Sean Penn's fifth feature film as director -- is an all-around dud. It's poorly shot and edited, crushingly heavy-handed, woefully misguided, and, to top it off, miserably long.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 28, 2017

Oscar-winning actors can't save this movie, which muddles through a dismayingly impressionistic first half-hour, before settling into a standard star-crossed romance.

| Jul 28, 2017

... an ill-conceived attempt to shine a light on human-rights atrocities featuring a tone-deaf perspective that tends to exploit victims of war and oppression in favor of glorifying their outsider rescuers.

| Jul 28, 2017

Rarely has a movie felt so simultaneously inane, stultifying and offensive.

| Jul 28, 2017

Sean Penn turns African strife into a two-hour perfume commercial with The Last Face, veering between gauzy impressionism and shrieky melodrama with his latest directorial effort.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jul 28, 2017

The Last Face takes on the right cause. The movie simply does so with the wrong story and the wrong characters entirely.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jul 28, 2017

As well meaning as this movie is, it is also a turgid, muddled one.

| Jul 27, 2017

Characters are undeveloped, dialogue is platitudinous and insincere, and even the leading roles are one-dimensional.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jul 27, 2017

The Last Face spends so much time on the on-again, off-again romance between Bardem's Miguel and Theron's Wren, the African victims are all but nameless and faceless backdrops.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 27, 2017

The experience of watching "The Last Face" is of watching scenes in which the wrong people and problems are consistently the focus of the action.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jul 27, 2017

A horrifically misguided exercise in movie-star narcissism.

| Original Score: 3/10 | Jul 27, 2017