Milk (2008) Critic Reviews

Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel.Read the full review

What makes Milk extraordinary isn't just that it's a nuanced, stirring portrait of one of the 20th century's most pivotal figures, but that it's also a nuanced, stirring portrait of the thousands of people he energized.Read the full review

Penn's Oscar-caliber transformation is breathtaking, and the saga of one man's fight for human rights is engrossing.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

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

More than acting, though, Penn's performance is a marvelous act of empathy in a movie that, for all its surprisingly conventional style, measures up to its stirring subject.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

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

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