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100Sean Penn makes a striking screen presence in This Must Be the Place, a smart, funny and original road movie by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino ("Il Divo").
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90Maybe, beneath the stylistic flourishes and bursts of operatic emotion, it is a simple story of psychological struggle, about a man in midlife reckoning with the damage of his past. But to settle on that interpretation is to deny or discount the splendid strangeness of Mr. Sorrentino's vision - and also, therefore, of the curious corners of reality he discovers along the way.
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88Few actors have played a wider variety of characters, and even fewer have done it without making it seem like a stunt.
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88The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.
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Oct 31, 201283This Must Be The Place practically dares viewers not to find it ridiculous, but few will accept the challenge.
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80It's hard to imagine sitting through the film without Penn in the role of Cheyenne. But there he is, in all his intense, bizarre glory, almost daring us to come along for the ride and rewarding us with a compelling trip when we accept.
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Nov 1, 201280Sorrentino's languorous photography, understated humor, and quiet but profound dramatic reveals coil together into something organic, whole, and achingly sweet.
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80Succeeding against the odds and adroitly blending its disparate elements, this is a fine entry into the Eurodirector-gawps-at-America subgenre.
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Oct 27, 201280Quirky, hilarious and moving, Sorrentino's first English-lingo production is a road trip of stunning scope yet deep intimacy, featuring an aged rock star-turned-Nazi hunter played by Sean Penn at his transformative best.
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78Mixing faded rock glory with Nazi-hunting and American road-tripping creates an odd hybrid that is completely transfixing, although some viewers are likely to find this film an awkward mishmash. The drama, however, is consistently offset by comic underpinnings, which are well-played by the actors and seamlessly presented by Sorrentino.
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75This Must Be the Place is a movie existing in a zonked-out realm where reality smashes head-on with a train-wreck hero too strange to be real, unless you're the love child of Ozzy Osbourne and the Cure's Robert Smith.
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75This isn't a great movie, but it is a special one. And Penn is something to see.
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Nov 4, 201270The director seems to be drawing a line from the horror of the war years to the infantilism of the Boomers and rock; the father lost his innocence, and the son froze his.
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70This mashup of genres and themes doesn't entirely succeed, but it is warm, funny and ably crafted.
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70This Must Be the Place is dazzling to behold, not least when our hero leaves Ireland. [29 Oct. & 5 Nov. 2012, p.128]
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63Penn has created a colorful tour guide, but in This Must Be the Place, there's no there there.
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Nov 1, 201260If the movie doesn't entirely get past its hard-to-buy premise, director Paolo Sorrentino does have the courage of his convictions, not just embracing every contradiction but spinning many of the story's contrivances into moments of strange, aching beauty.
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60The film's numerous idiosyncrasies - virtues at the outset - ultimately suffocate it.
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60Determinedly quirky and cool, arresting and ultimately too baffling to be satisfying, although Penn is priceless. Cultdom beckons.
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60With a sure-to-be-talked about performance by Sean Penn and the dueling themes of overcoming depression and revenge against Nazi atrocities, This Must Be The Place is anywhere BUT the place for moviegoers who aren't in the mood for something different.
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60The Holocaust material was not entirely successful, though certainly transmitted with absolute certainty and sincerity. This Must Be the Place is not my favourite of Sorrentino's films, but it certainly deserved inclusion at Cannes, and deserves to be watched for the glorious Byrne moments alone.
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50Eccentric, misguided and occasionally charming and sweet, this curiosity item with Sean Penn in one of his nuttier performances is unlikely to be embraced critically or commercially.
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42Sean Penn is one of those actors, like Nicolas Cage, who is best (sometimes worst) when he's over-the-top. Unlike Cage, Penn doesn't pour himself into dreadful commercial vehicles. No, his dreadful movies are usually not destined for the multiplex. Case in point: This Must Be the Place.
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42Sorrentino's very title suggests someone who doesn't have the most well-defined sense of where they ultimately want to wind up; as goes the Talking Heads song, so goes the movie.
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40There's no "place" in this place, no clear destination -- and no real payoff in a film that stands a cinematic curiosity but little more.
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33Guided by an over-the-top Nazi hunter played by Judd Hirsch (clearly enjoying himself), Cheyenne begins a road trip through Middle American that goes nowhere, and Penn's mopey has-been routine starts to feel like a bad joke that just keeps getting worse.
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25This Must Be the Place is as emotionally zonked-out as its protagonist, and just as difficult to warm up to.
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25Worst of all, in promoting its hero's eccentric journey as a voyage of healing, the movie replaces emotional precision and intellectual honesty with syrupy sincerity and insistence. It turns boring and cute and begs us to love it.
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20As juxtapositions go, regressed Goth rock star and Holocaust could hardly be more bizarre, and bizarre can be good when it's done deftly. In this case, however, it's done ponderously and sententiously.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 6
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Mixed: 1 out of 6
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Negative: 2 out of 6
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