- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100A movie I loved on first sight and, even more important, love in remembrance. Taken all in all, there's only one last thing to say about it. Go.
-
100It's like Chekhov with a British accent.
-
100Unassuming masterpiece about life, love and the cruel joke of old age.
-
100Like finding that perfect stage of moderate drunkenness in which the senses are sharpened rather than dulled, and time passes with leisurely grace.
-
90The lifelong friends in Fred Schepisi's marvelous Last Orders actually seem like lifelong friends.
-
90Superbly adapted by Fred Schepisi from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Graham Swift, Last Orders pays quietly passionate tribute to the unsung working-class generation that fought World War II and survived to take up apparently humdrum lives.
-
90A funny and touching film that is gorgeously acted by a British cast to rival Gosford Park's.
-
90Gathering its forces slowly, this careful, thoughtful film, quietly but deeply moving, is dramatic without seeming to be.
-
90Shows the dying tremors of a generation, and you might feel as if you can see every molecule, every atom give up the ghost.
-
90Delicately handled and superbly textured, this fine adaptation of Graham Swift's Booker Prize-winning novel deals with all the really big subjects: love, friendship, death, life.
-
90Sad and lovely.
-
90The movie's pace is unhurried by Hollywood standards, but it's all the richer in character detail.
-
90The film's biggest strength is the same characteristic that may cause people to underrate it: that the group of friends we watch onscreen feel not like England's greatest actors showing off, but rather a group of friends who have indeed known each other for years through life's little triumphs and large tragedies.
-
88Too many films about the dead involve mourning, and too few involve laughter. Yet at lucky funerals there is a desire to remember the good times.
-
88A superb film that begins with death, ends in renewal, and finds almost as much to laugh about as to cry for.
-
88Richly textured, beautifully acted.
-
80Given the number of characters involved and the fact that the film flashes back and forth over a 40-year period, the film flows beautifully, thanks in large part to excellent casting and Kate Williams's fluid editing.
-
80Wry humor and even a certain sexiness break through the reserve of a rueful, realistic, but finally emotionally rewarding film.
-
I was hooked from the start.
-
75It's a warm, skillful excavation of what look like ordinary lives, ones that aren't so simple once you dig a little deeper.
-
75It is remarkably, unsentimentally dramatized by Fred Schepisi, courtesy of the pitch-perfect performances of its ensemble British cast.
-
75The stars ultimately carry the day, the film cumulatively builds both an emotional power and tender wisdom that's very affecting.
-
70A friend called Fred Schepisi's ensemble drama "a crusty old white man's 'Joy Luck Club'" -- an assessment that isn't without some kernel of truth.
-
70If truth be told, the film is less than the sum of its parts; the main problem is the fragmented narrative structure, a legacy of the literary source. Still, it's a joy to see men and women with dense life stories played by powerful actors with long and distinguished careers.
-
67The storytelling may be ordinary, but the cast is one of those all-star reunions.
-
50Good performances by a distinguished cast don't quite overcome the weaknesses of the disappointing screenplay.
-
50A ho-hum male weepie/road comedy that's worth watching mostly because of a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of England's greatest working-class actors.
-
50The actors do their best, particularly the impeccable Mirren, but Schepisi draws a shroud of chaste dullness over their scenes and lays on an energy- sapping score.
-
50Never quite shrugs off its literary manners. [18 & 25 Feb 2002, p. 200]
-
40The temporal jumps between the present and varying points in the past deprive the film of a sense of completeness; the transitions from scene to scene are largely disorienting, leaving you struggling to find your bearings.
-
30The carload of codgers in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders merely bellyache, philosophize, crack unfunny jokes, and ruminate simplemindedly about Death.