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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 Criticthe end result feels like business as usual done by-the-book.
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 actors' understated performances, coupled with an underwritten screenplay, ultimately leave the audience dangling.
Top CriticPlodding biopic.
Reaches for complexity but ends up, as you’d expect from a partnership with Masterpiece Theater, rendering Pierrepoint palatable as a decent, principled chap who was just doing his job.
The filmmakers fall through their own trapdoor, using the hangman's story to fashion a preachy anti-capital punishment message movie that seems at odds with the man himself.
Shergold can't quite pull off tricky balancing act between understated working-class poetic miserablism, in the manner of acknowledged exemplar Vera Drake, and an issue-based melodrama's demands for a flashy third-act.
Top CriticOverdramatizes Albert's 24-year career.
This recounting of Pierrepoint's rise and fall proves mostly a schematic message movie.
Handsomely crafted and well-acted, but its sense of scale is as constricted as a noose.
Albert Pierrepoint single-handedly killed over 450 people in his career, dispatching most of them with an icy precision in less than 30 seconds.
You have to wonder just how true to life the melodramatic depiction of these events is.
In the wrong hands this could have been capital punishment, but as a low key drama about one man's unique approach to life and other people's deaths, it's actually just, er, capital.
A genuine and skillful account of one of Britain's most morally ambiguous working-class characters.
Pierrepoint is worth seeing for Shergold’s attention to process and for all the ghoulish details.
...there's little doubt that the film will work just as well on the small screen as it does in theaters.
Handles capitol punishment in a similar way that "Vera Drake" tackled the abortion issue ... allows Timothy Spall's resplendent dramatic chops to shine.
The shocker near the end is one of the more heartbreaking pieces of cinema in quite a while.
An emotionally powerful drama about the dirty business of capital punishment.
May 31, 2007:
Critical Consensus: "Knocked Up" Is A Knockout; "Mr. Brooks," "Gracie" Less So
This week at the movies we've got matters of life ("Knocked Up," starring Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen), death ("Mr. Brooks," starring Kevin Costner and... More...
Last week, Moviefone offered us their worst films of the 2000s. Now see their 40 best!
Movieline gets bravely swept away with the recycled refuse of the 2000s.
Get all the latest movie updates, reviews, interviews and features here.
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