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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Milk
Universal acclaim
Based on 39 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 187 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by: Dustin Lance Black
Directed by: Gus Van Sant
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 26, 2008
DVD: March 10, 2009
Running Time: 128 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for language, some sexual content and brief violence
Starring Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna, Victor Garber, and Denis O'Hare, Stephen Spinella
In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man to be voted into major public office in America. His victory was not just a victory for gay rights; he forged coalitions across the political spectrum. From senior citizens to union workers, Harvey Milk changed the very nature of what it means to be a fighter for human rights and became, before his untimely death in 1978, a hero for all Americans. (Focus Features)
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Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database
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...
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Sean Penn never tries to show Harvey Milk as a hero, and never needs to. He shows him as an ordinary man, kind, funny, flawed, shrewd, idealistic, yearning for a better world.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
With Milk, a great San Francisco story becomes a great American story.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
It's a total triumph, brimming with humor, heart, sexual heat, political provocation and a crying need to stir things up, just like Harvey did. If there's a better movie around this year, with more bristling purpose, I sure as hell haven't seen it.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Perry Seibert
Harvey Milk embodied the concept that "all politics is personal," and by presenting the famed Mayor of Castro Street's personal and public lives with such clarity and empathy, Van Sant has made something very rare in Hollywood -- a genuinely powerful political film that works equally well as a story of personal triumph.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
Smiling more than in all of his movies since "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" combined, Penn goes way deep and soulful in a highly ingratiating performance that's the one to beat for the Best Actor Oscar.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
What makes Milk extraordinary isn't just that it's a nuanced, stirring portrait of one of the 20th century's most pivotal figures, but that it's also a nuanced, stirring portrait of the thousands of people he energized.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black pull off something very close to magic. They make a film that's both historically precise and as graceful, unpredictable, and moving as a good fiction film--that is to say, a work of art.
Time Richard Corliss
Three decades ago, Milk and his ilk were able to enlist President Jimmy Carter and future President Ronald Reagan in the gay fight against Prop. 6. But this fall, Barack Obama was all but mute on Prop. 8. Some community organizers, like the President-elect, are more cautious than others. It's a shame Harvey Milk wasn't around to recruit him.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
A fascinating film -- more docudrama than biopic.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Though it's unflinching in its depiction of homosexual affection, the marvel of the movie is the dexterity with which it transcends the specificity of its characters and gay theme to be a universal human statement and profound political epic.
Read Full Review >NPR Bob Mondello
What sets this film entertainingly apart from most civil-rights sagas, though, are a slew of relaxed, offhandedly persuasive performances, along with the flamboyance of hippie-era San Francisco.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
The film is superbly crafted, covering huge amounts of time, people and the zeitgeist without a moment of lapsed energy or inattention to detail.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Milk is a rowdy anthem of triumph, brought to an abrupt halt by Milk's personal tragedies and the unfathomable moral chaos of Dan White.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Penn's Oscar-caliber transformation is breathtaking, and the saga of one man's fight for human rights is engrossing.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
The story of Harvey Milk is a tragedy, but not since Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" has Sean Penn played such a serenely happy individual.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Milk feels like an important picture, but not in a way that makes it tedious to watch. There's no pretentious sheen to the proceedings.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Whatever you think of gay people (or politicians), you may find the movie compelling viewing.
Read Full Review >Empire Colin Kennedy
Milk thoroughly deserves all of the press ink that will doubtless be spilt over it. Wear your 'Vote Penn' Oscar pin with pride.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
How you feel about Milk may depend on whether you've seen Rob Epstein's great, Oscar-winning 1984 documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk." Van Sant's movie lacks that film's shattering emotional impact. (Rage is not a color in the director's palette.) For those coming to Milk's story for the first time, however, this will be a rousing experience.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
More than acting, though, Penn's performance is a marvelous act of empathy in a movie that, for all its surprisingly conventional style, measures up to its stirring subject.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Milk is good enough, thanks mostly to Penn's uncanny evocation, to bring Harvey Milk alive as a vital and highly relevant figure, rather than a distant political abstraction or gay saint. (He very definitely was neither.)
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Brolin's work is superlatively expressive of the inchoate impulses roiling inside his sorry character. But good as most of the cast is, the show belongs squarely to Penn.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Milk is so immediate that it's impossible to separate the movie's moment from this one.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
The deeply heartfelt Milk is more of a surface skim: a fairly standard biopic – if a very fine one, indeed – but never the transcendent work one would have hoped from the filmmaker or his subject.
Read Full Review >Premiere Stuart Levine
Beyond Milk, few of the other characters are given much to do.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Milk is an agitprop fantasy about the selflessness of sainthood. If anybody but Penn was playing the saint, we'd probably feel as if we were being sold a bill of goods. Instead, he just about pulls it off. Such is the treachery of talent.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
As good as it is depicting his career, Milk doesn't fare quite as well as a portrait of the man himself.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
For its mesmerizing first two-thirds, Van Sant keeps the film tightly focused on his subject, superbly played by Penn and intimately shot, home-movie style, by Harris Savides. But when the director pulls back to detail Harvey Milk's fight against gay backlash, Milk gets derailed. And - dare I say it? - didactic.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
It's a testament to Van Sant's way with actors that the performances are better than the lines and that the film tugs undeniably at the heart as the awful finale falls. But a lack of poetry and freshness in the writing nags.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
A worthy docudrama that is solid if not sublime. But, sometimes, a merely good film can brush up against greatness, and this one does so twice – in Sean Penn's magnetic performance and in the cautionary tale's contemporary resonance.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
There's nothing terribly wrong with Milk, it's just that its celebration of a culture and a neighborhood, its valentine to the early days of gay rights activism, is mostly more conventional than compelling.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Milk is one of the most heartfelt portraits of a politician ever made--the man himself remains just out of reach.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Milk is steeped in the street-level details of acquiring and applying power, and a few early episodes show how clearly Milk understood the economic component.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Scott Mendelson
A fine character study and a solid look at a specific political movement and a certain time and place.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
It's a little disappointing to see Van Sant dial back into mainstream respectability. Had he evoked Harvey Milk's life with the poetry that he did Kurt Cobain's, Milk might have been something special.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
The final result somehow undersells a man whose life and death were watershed moments in the gay rights movement.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.4 (out of 10) based on 187 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Chris K. gave it a7:
Stinks if you already know the ending.
Tony B. gave it a5:
"Milk" is too black and white, too one-sided and too we vs. they to be a successful account of a major episode in American history. Sean Penn is a fine actor who has given a number of superb performances, but his work here is not one of them. The supporting cast is satisfactory, except for James Franco who is superb. The film never fully shows us how Harvey Milk was able to become such an important factor in San Francisco politics in such a relatively short time. Either an undeveloped script or faulty editing may be the culprit. Oddly enough, the Dan White character, easily the most interesting one of all, is given short shrift. His murdering of Milk and the Mayor is woefully understated and woefully anti-climactic.
Cynthia G gave it a2:
Mr. Milk might have led a watershed moment, but this film doesn't do him or it justice. It was just plain boring. I was not engaged by any of the characters at all -- there was almost no life to them. James Franco was the only actor who allowed me to engage with his emotional journey. The wrong actors were nominated and won.
Horace Ward gave it a4:
Way overrated.
Andras G. gave it a0:
It's sad that movies like this get high scores. Because of movies like this we get all the other crap spinoffs. This is a boring movie. Don't waste money on it.
Richard S gave it a10:
A shame that there is no audio commentary on the DVD. Would have been nice to hear the thoughts of the people involved in the making of this wonderful slice of American LGBT history.
Mark C gave it a7:
This is not a great film. This is not a film that will resonate with time. In fact, it is probably exactly what you think it will be, as most biopics are. But it is a good film, and a worthwhile one. It is as well-executed as can be expected. Van Sant is a great director though his "style" is less noticeable in this. Sean Penn certainly deserving of his Oscar, and the rest of the cast is really great. But as much as I learned about, and gained admiration for Harvey Milk, I was oddly unmoved, sometimes even bored--as if I'd been kept at a distance. I have to blame the biopic form for this; it's entirely too predictable as a form.
