27 November 2008 1:36 AM, PST | From Studio Briefing - Film News | See recent Studio Briefing - Film News news
Some critics have already bestowed an Oscar on Sean Penn for his performance in Milk even before the nominations have been announced. Certainly, with hardly an exception, they have praised his performance in the film about the murdered openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk. Roger Ebert begins his review in the Chicago Sun-Times with the words "Sean Penn amazes me" and goes on to remark that in this film Penn "creates a character who may seem like an odd bird to mainstream America and makes him completely identifiable." In the Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips writes, "Penn is superb." AP movie critic Christy Lemire writes that Penn delivers "one of the most glorious performances ever in the actor's long and varied career." Mick Lasalle in the San Francisco Chronicle comments that Penn plays Milk "as an utterly liberated man, and this liberates Penn as an actor." And Claudia Puig in USA Today calls Penn's work "a magnificent, career-topping performance." As for the movie itself, A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times is typical. Scott writes that the power of the movie "lies in its uncanny balancing of nuance and scale, its ability to be about nearly everything -- love, death, politics, sex, modernity -- without losing sight of the intimate particulars of its story. Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel." But Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times is not impressed. "There's nothing terribly wrong with Milk," he writes. "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."
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