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100This production, directed by Michael Hoffman, is like a great night at the theatre--the two performing demons go at each other full tilt and produce scenes of Shakespearean affection, chagrin, and rage.
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91The Last Station isn't all that it should be, but whenever these two actors are onscreen, it's like a great night at the theater.
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Three superb performances by Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer and James McAvoy should have Oscar handicappers drooling.
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90For those who enjoy actors who can play it up without ever overplaying their hands, The Last Station is the destination of choice.
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90If you come to this expecting the philosophical depth and psychological detail of Tolstoy's work you're sure to be disappointed, but as an actors' romp it's delectable.
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89The Last Station would have satisfied alone as a witty, manic lark, but as it moves toward the titular railway station, the film unfurls into so much more – a work of compassion, modulated mournfulness, and unchecked joy.
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88Helen Mirren outdoes even her Oscar-winning performance in "The Queen" with her tour de force as Countess Sofya Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman's delightful The Last Station.
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88Set exactly a century ago, The Last Station is a droll tragicomedy starring those battling Tolstoys, whose family is unhappy in its own way.
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88Every second Helen Mirren is on-screen in The Last Station is a study in peerless talent.
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88The movie's a chocolate box of nougaty performances, from Christopher Plummer's delightful depiction of Tolstoy as a ribald old naïf to Paul Giamatti twirling his waxed mustache and playing to the gallery as Vladimir Chertkov.
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88A stop any literary-minded movie-goer will want to make.
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88It is edifying, it is emotionally engaging, it is embraceable.
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88As they build up steam, two powerful actors keep us wondering whether this train is bound for war or peace.
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83A grandly entertaining historical drama.
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80Handsome, engrossing, frequently very funny for a literary bio drama, and ultimately deeply moving, with pitch-perfect performances from one and all.
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80Never miss a chance to see Helen Mirren. You certainly could do worse as far as movie advice goes. Mirren may not be the only reason to see The Last Station, about the final year of Leo Tolstoy's long, eventful life, but she's the best reason.
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80Solid middlebrow biographical fare in which meaty roles are acted to the hilt by a cast more than ready for the feast.
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80The entire film is a seduction, one that draws us into a vanished world where Count Leo Tolstoy and his wife of 48 years, Countess Sofya, come to joyous, tempestuous life in a matched pair of magnificent performances by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.
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75The film itself, energetically directed and written by Michael Hoffman, can't always rise to the level of its two dynamo stars.
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75Some women are simply sexy forever. Helen Mirren is a woman like that. She's 64. As she enters her 70s, we'll begin to develop a fondness for sexy septuagenarians.
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75Literature lasts, but sometimes, The Last Station suggests, the ties that bind last, too.
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75Tells the story of Leo Tolstoy's last year from a refreshing new perspective.
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75It's fascinating to see how life imitates art; the closing months of Tolstoy's life read like something he might have penned. One need not be familiar with "War and Peace," "Anna Karenina," or anything else written by the Russian great to appreciate the movie, however.
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75The movie seemed a disappointment at first, until I decided I was missing the point: It's actually a drama about the way people treat a celebrity – with fear or reverence, as a source of income or reflected glory– and the way their own personalities change around him, while his stays the same. In that way, the film's a small triumph.
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75Giamatti, in fact, makes off with a few scenes as the literally mustache-twirling antagonist, providing some welcome moments of over-the-top levity.
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70The tony cast emotes like mad, but polished Brits are so temperamentally unlike Russians that every four-syllable patronymic sounds like iambic pentameter.
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Tolstoy fought a love-hate war with his bipolar wife, Sonya, and thank God for that, since it allows Helen Mirren, basically playing a cross between Ibsen drama queen Hedda Gabler and the little squirrel from "A Doll's House," to waltz away with the movie.
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70Slides gracefully between comedy and pathos (it aims for tragedy, but doesn't quite get there).
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Little more than a gilded trifle, though it offers its share of light enjoyments.
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63At its best, The Last Station vividly illustrates the enduring Russian gift for iconography, whether spiritual, secular or something in between.
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60Though it feels at first like a musty edition of "Masterpiece Theatre," Michael Hoffman's adaptation of a novel by Jay Parini holds enough surprises to make a memorable impact.
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50Fitfully interesting, occasionally cringe-worthy, this is the sort of stagy production that mixes ribaldry and campy overacting that evokes summer theatre productions.
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Working with uneven material, the illustrious cast is too often stranded in a realm of tony, high-art camp.
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40The kind of movie that gives literature a bad name. Not because it undermines the dignity of a great writer and his work, but because it is so self-consciously eager to flaunt its own gravity and good taste.
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