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Last Days
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 36 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 42 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Musical
Written by: Gus Van Sant
Directed by: Gus Van Sant
Release Date:
Theatrical: July 22, 2005
DVD: October 25, 2005
Running Time: 97 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for language and some sexual content
Starring Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green, Nicole Vicius, Ricky Jay, and Thadeus A. Thomas
Last Days is filmmaker Gus Van Sant's fictional meditation on the inner turmoil that engulfs a brilliant, but troubled musician in the final hours of his life. (Picturehouse)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Drugstore Cowboy Elephant Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Finding Forrester Gerry Good Will Hunting Milk My Own Private Idaho Paranoid Park Psycho To Die For
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Village Voice Dennis Lim
The brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sant's artistic rebirth.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
A true American tragedy, directed with skill and conviction.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
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. If the dead had it to do again, they might wish that, this time, they'd at least been conscious enough to realize what was happening.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Despite all of Van Sant's narrative feints and coy protestations, the audience is left with one searing memory after seeing Last Days, and that memory is of Cobain. Was he, as Gordon's character suggests at one point, simply a rock-and-roll cliche? Or was he a visionary genius, as the name of Pitt's character implies?
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The poetry of Last Days has a stoned grandeur.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
In its unstated cynicism, beauty, and self-pity, Last Days fits the myth of Cobain like a torn pair of jeans.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
The result is a movie that seems not quite real and yet never false but somehow partakes of both -- rather like the prospect of death.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
It's an experimental film about a sensational event, placing tragedy in the context of the dulling normality of human life and resisting easy interpretation, just as did the inexplicable death of Kurt Cobain.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
What Last Days offers is a blank and narrative-free, but pitch-perfect, dreamscape on which to project your own personal ruminations on Kurt, fame, whatever, nevermind. If you have none, you're on your own.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
It's definitely NOT a conventional biopic about Kurt Cobain. (Nor, as its title oddly suggests, is it about the demise of writer-director Van Sant.) It's a tone poem, an elliptical, fictionalized meditation about the ill-fated rock 'n' roll superstar.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
The glacial pacing may put some people off, but it also has a hypnotic quality. And some viewers might find it fascinating to be a voyeur into someone's tortured psyche.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
The story is pure speculation, Van Sant's fantasy on what may have happened during those final days of self-isolation, but he loads the film with distinctive imagery.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
There is a method to its madness, since the madness here is really Cobain's. Last Days mythologizes his suicide as a haunting act of fulfillment: the consummation of a life that had already ceased to be.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
It's like a walking tour inside the head of a deeply troubled, deeply talented young man, where most of the systems have already shut down.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Using long takes, largely improvised dialogue and an increasingly out-of-joint time frame, Van Sant chronicles the final hours of fictional but Cobain-like rock star Blake.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Mr. Van Sant and his star, Michael Pitt, together with the cinematographer Harris Savides, set out to do a somber, rigorously distanced study of a man drained of all resources, and slowly though inexorably approaching his end. That they have done exactly what they meant to do is notable.
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
In the end, it feels like a life aestheticized, not examined.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
In the leading role Michael Pitt is neither good nor less than good. He simply mopes along druggedly for the film's ninety-seven minutes. Van Sant's inculcation of this non-performance is clearly part of his dogged negativism, his intent to purge his film.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Jean Oppenheimer
Last Days shouldn't be half as engrossing as it turns out to be.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Van Sant, following "Gerry" and the superb "Elephant," is on the same elliptical quest. His journey is labored but undeniably hypnotic.
Read Full Review >Premiere Aaron Hillis
Van Sant has mastered this kind of driftingly contemplative imagery and his layered soundscapes would make Sonic Youth proud (of course, Kim Gordon makes an appearance), but the introduction of other characters fracture the film's greatest asset, its lonely first-person atmosphere.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Greg Bellavia
A victory for ambitious filmmaking if not always a successful attempt at character study.
Read Full Review >Empire Steve O'Hagan
A beguiling work of some beauty, this is a further move into a world of hypnotic, observational cinema for Gus Van Sant. But in the end, the detached style has the power to alienate as much as to enthral.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Van Sant's refusal to delve into his subject in anything but an abstract way renders the movie pointless and frustrating -- a lyrical, lovely tone poem, signifying little.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
While Last Days succeeds as a nature documentary, Van Sant fails to penetrate human nature. The result is a portrait without a face.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
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.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
How can one defend this prolonged mumble of a motion picture? Well, some of the motion has a hypnotizing grace.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
It's a meticulous nest of interlocking elements, not at all haphazard. But in its unrelieved bleakness and singularity of vision, it supplies very little in the way of conventional movieness.
Read Full Review >Variety Leslie Felperin
Result is dead-on depiction of the hedonistic rock lifestyle, punctuated by sequences of haunting beauty but also quasi-religious imagery that borders on tacky.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Yet music, the one thing that might have given the film some kick, is de-emphasized, with only two songs sneaking into the picture.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
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.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
The bottom line of Last Days seems to be, fame's a bitch. Yes, Gus - now start making movies again that tell stories, please.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.4 (out of 10) based on 42 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Alex D gave it a0:
This must be the movie that drove Kurt Cobain to suicide.
Nico gave it a10:
People who use the words chick, crap or dude (in any context) should be sent to a gas chamber. Thank you.
Andrew G gave it a2:
It's always funny to me that meandering crap like this is praised as genius. Watch the "making of" feature on the dvd. They literally just made crap up as they went along. It may be "incredibly liberating" for the actors involved, but it makes for an unbearably tedious and painfully boring viewing experience. Gus Van Sant is horribly overrated.
Brock F. gave it a0:
Terrible. Perhaps the worst movie I've ever seen, and I've seen "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation."
Laura P. gave it a10:
Was an awesome film with great music!
Erik L. gave it a2:
This film is way too loosely constructed and it is pretentious to overlook the fact that it does little to captivate the audience. Michael Pitt's performance mostly consists in grunts and moans and is nothing to be proud of. The religious references throughout are puzzling and it feels like Van Sant is trying to make the average viewer see this as a film about a rockstar evading salvation until his untimely death. Formally speaking, this is not a movie about Cobain, and should not be seen as such. It is a fictional account of the life of an artist similar to Cobain, and as such is not biographically accurate. From the formalist perspective we also have no evidence that he is a junkie. These external interpretations detract from the essential lack of any true cohesion, since the entire film could be summed up in seven minutes. It is another silly attempt by Van Sant to create a film about an event without researching the event; in the nineties his work was excellent but lately he has been trying way too hard to appeal to the sycophantic art critic who actually does not have much of an aesthetic sense. The only redeeming features are Harmony Korine's chat about D&D with Jerry Garcia and when Blake (not Kurt) falls off the stretcher. I can understand people feeling a certain need to praise a film about Nirvana but this isn't what Van Sant set out to do. It is a loosely-constructed showcase of cinematography accompanied Moore and Westerkamp's excellent soundscape, but the plot itself is weak and boring. There are better things to do than to waste 97 minutes on this film.
John M. gave it a10:
Wonderful movie, well crafted and seems to clear up some of the mystery surrounding Kurt, although it states at the end the movie it is a work of fiction, it is based on Kurts last days.
