Milk (2008) Critic Reviews

By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.Read the full review

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 the full review

A fascinating film -- more docudrama than biopic.Read the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

With Milk, a great San Francisco story becomes a great American story.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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 the full review