Last Days

Village Voice Dennis Lim

The brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sant's artistic rebirth.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

A true American tragedy, directed with skill and conviction.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

One of this year's indisputably great films.

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.

Newsweek David Ansen

A hauntingly beautiful tone poem.

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?

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

The poetry of Last Days has a stoned grandeur.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Slate David Edelstein

An extraordinarily potent brew.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dallas Observer Jean Oppenheimer

Last Days shouldn't be half as engrossing as it turns out to be.

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.

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.

Film Threat Greg Bellavia

A victory for ambitious filmmaking if not always a successful attempt at character study.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

In trouble from its first minutes.