Critic consensus:Michael Hoffman's script doesn't quite live up to its famous subject, but this Tolstoy biopic benefits from a spellbinding tour de force performance by Helen Mirren.

Numbered reviews:1. Little more than a gilded trifle, though it offers its share of light enjoyments.
2. A lovely quicksilver version of literary history, with the accent on young love that emerges unbidden, and old love that endures.
3. Plummer is just fantastic overall, and easily the best reason to sit through the film's two-hour running time.
4. Plummer and Mirren find theatrical sparks; they enliven Hoffman's thesis about Tolstoy's beliefs and his contradictory, actual love life.
5. Just as you're settled into thinking it's going to be college-lit-class comedic throughout, the game changes and everybody puts on their serious faces for the final act.
6. There's room for both drama and fun in director Michael Hoffman's staid script, but he doesn't find much of either. And the key problem seems to be: not enough Tolstoy.
7. Turning a fabulously operatic, thematically replete true-life tale into a frosted slice of dinner theatrics, The Last Station conveys nothing more convincingly than its own self-regard.
8. Helen Mirren outdoes even her Oscar-winning performance in The Queen.
9. The movie has its evocative moments, but it's so rigged on the side of anti-intellectualism that you'd never guess that Tolstoy's late work inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
10. The script falls a little flat but all those hordes of Leo Tolstoy fans out there will have a hoot.


Critic consensus:Faithful to the source material without sacrificing its own cinematic flair, Justin Kurzel's Macbeth rises on the strength of a mesmerizing Michael Fassbender performance to join the upper echelon of big-screen Shakespeare adaptations.

Numbered reviews:1. Spearheaded by Michael Fassbender's mesmerising lead performance, this tragic tale grips your senses from the beginning and never lets go.
2. Kurzel makes full use of his medium, which can't be said of all cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare plays.
3. Macbeth has been previously well served by Roman Polanski and Akira Kurosawa but Kurzel has fashioned a pared-down success of his own.
4. This ferocious, masterful interpretation of the Scottish play lets rip with an onslaught of visual and emotional bravado, setting its story of ruthless ambition and spilt blood amid billowing smoke and red, raging fire.
5. The performances are astonishingly intense, their sound and fury signifying everything.
6. This arresting adaptation of the most cinematic of Shakespeare's plays is as near to definitive as Roman Polanski's celebrated 1971 version.
7. Inspired, innovative, stunning, with unforgettable performances and images, this is up there with the great screen Shakespeares.
8. This Macbeth is a magnificent tragedy, and with it Kurzel stakes his claim as one of the most exciting directors working today.
9. The film is far too enthralled by Fassbender's animal magnetism to make any profound enquiry into what oils Macbeth's cogs. Alas, what's done cannot be undone.
10. It's a rough, primitive kingdom that Kurzel has built but there are rules, dictated by kin and comradeship, and the Macbeths' violation of them is shown to be a genuinely tragic folie a deux. It's great Shakespeare.


Critic consensus:A beautifully acted, quietly moving little film.

Numbered reviews:
1. At turns heartbreaking and heart-stirring.
2. There's certainly nothing objectionable about Tully, but there's nothing remarkable either. It resides in that cinematic middle ground of not-bad, not-great, just okay.
3. A heartfelt, understated and occasionally heavy-handed slice of heartland.
4. It's a promising debut made even better by an impressive bunch of actors.
5. Flawed but promising.
6. Watching Tully reminded me of a time when calling a movie 'little' was a compliment, a way of saying a director had found ways to locate his movie in a world that seemed entirely real.
7. Tully is worth a look for its true-to-life characters, its sensitive acting, its unadorned view of rural life and the subtle direction of first-timer Hilary Birmingham.
8. Best to just pick up a blade of grass and chew on it while absorbing the scenic imagery and natural acting of a strong cast.
9. The movie resonates with a rare and genuine sweetness.
10. The revelations... are not in the plot but in the rhythm of life and the pace of days (brought to life perfectly in the crisp, bright, sunlit photography)...