Last Winter, The

Village Voice Nathan Lee

It's the imaginative background, and Fessenden's talent at insinuating it into the action, that counts--and unnerves--in this most chilling of global-warming movies.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

The Last Winter won’t win many fans among those who place the saving of union jobs above the repairing of the ozone layer. But this is a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

It's billed as an environmental horror story, but The Last Winter bears all the hallmarks of an ever-popular genre that has always pitted science, technology and reason against emotion, awe and nature. It bears all the hallmarks of the gothic: ghosts, death, alienated sexuality, decay, secrets, madness and, of course, awe and trepidation in the face of the sublime power of nature.

Premiere Aaron Hillis

A richly drawn, ambitious character piece both socially relevant and genuinely suspenseful.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Gruesome and terrifying things happen in The Last Winter, but there's no gratuitous gore or torture, and the film's real power comes from its building sense that something really, really bad is ABOUT to happen.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

And if the film's 11th-hour CGI effects aren't entirely convincing, the notion that oil itself is haunted by the restless spirit of every once-living thing that time reduced and mingled into the earth's black blood throws off a primordial chill.

New York Post V.A. Musetto

While the slow buildup won't bowl 'em over at suburban multiplexes, the film should please Fessenden's loyal followers and win him new ones.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The Last Winter sounds like a genre-movie platypus - a little bit of this, a little piece of that - but it stops short of laying an egg. In fact, it works eerily well.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Succeeds royally at building a sense of apocalyptic dread. It isn't quite so successful at sustaining that mood, and Fessenden resorts to blurry images of totemic spirit forces and stampeding moose specters to get where he's going. And where exactly is that? To a place designed to scare the bejesus out of us planet-pillaging consumers.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Who said that an environmental horror film couldn't be didactic and spooky at the same time?

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Something wicked this way comes in the nifty horror film The Last Winter, crawling through the hallways and howling into the dread night.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Like his "Wendigo," the film has a lot of mumbo jumbo about ancient spirits revived and angered by human disrespect--the old Indian-graveyard paradigm, as clunky as ever. But the context is overpoweringly eerie.

Variety Dennis Harvey

An imperfect but compelling thriller.

The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore

The long buildup is too deliberate to please the mainstream horror crowd, and the finale might alienate more niche audiences, but in between there's a good bit to savor.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray

The Last Winter's heart is in the right place, but it isn't pumping any blood.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Among cautionary tales of gloom-and-doom, it may out-gore Gore, but it doesn't entertain.

San Francisco Chronicle David Wiegand

The film isn't very interesting because it isn't well made.