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Reviews Counted:50
Fresh:38
Rotten:12
Average Rating:7/10
Consensus: Director Adrian Shergold doesn't shy away from the darker elements of the movie's subject, and Timothy Spall is mesmerizing as the title character.
Synopsis: Timothy Spall (Professor Pettigrew from the Harry Potter movies) gives a magnificently multilayered performance as the protagonist in PIERREPOINT: THE LAST HANGMAN. Spall plays Albert Pierrepoint,... [More]
Starring: Timothy Spall, Juliet Stevenson, Eddie Marsan, James Corden
Director: Adrian Shergold
A suitably sombre treatment of a sombre story, Pierrepoint is nevertheless a riveting drama, sketching out not only the salient facts of Albert Pierrepoint's life but the turmoil in which that life caused in his soul
Top CriticPlodding biopic.
The key to the film is in the performances by Spall and Stevenson -- and by Marsan. The utter averageness of the characters, their lack of insight, their normality, contrasts with the subject matter in an unsettling way.
Top CriticAlbert Pierrepoint single-handedly killed over 450 people in his career, dispatching most of them with an icy precision in less than 30 seconds.
Spall is more than worthy of future leading roles.
Overdramatizes Albert's 24-year career.
Based on their press materials, they think they have made a film damning capital punishment and exploring Britain's most famous executioner. In fact, they haven't. But they have made a film of artistic beauty and endless fascination.
Grim and disturbing yet perversely riveting.
The movie grows more compelling in the latter half as British public opinion turns against capital punishment and Pierrepoint begins to have his own doubts.
There is a great deal of food for thought in a film that personalizes the effects of the death penalty on both the executed and the executioner.
A genuine and skillful account of one of Britain's most morally ambiguous working-class characters.
...a powerful pairing of work by two terrific actors [Spall and Stevenson].
The very title of this movie seems to message its doom. What could possibly be dramatic enough about Britain's last hangman to carry our interest over a 90-minute film? A whole lot, it turns out.
A completely engaging film. It's all about performance, and Timothy Spall is riveting as the earnest hangman. If you're desperate for a movie that has nothing to do with sequels or product placement, look no further.
[The film's] grittiness instantly adds to the historically and socio-economically convincing picture of working-class Yorkshire in the last century.
Very much a bookend to Vera Drake in its mixture of post war British reserve and ugly reality. [Actor] Spall makes it work, creating a little man with big and terrible secrets.
Somewhere in this true story lies a grand statement about what taking lives for a living really does to a person’s moral compass. [Director] Adrian Shergold never quite finds it; his film dutifully recounts the facts but only skims the surface.
The shot angles, the gray look of the film as a whole and Timothy Spall’s spectacular and understated performance as Pierrepoint make this one of the most powerful anti-capital punishment films I’ve seen.
Handsomely crafted and well-acted, but its sense of scale is as constricted as a noose.
It's Timothy Spall who really carries the film.
May 31, 2007:
Critical Consensus: "Knocked Up" Is A Knockout; "Mr. Brooks," "Gracie" Less So
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