The Last Hangman 2005

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: Pierrepoint is worth seeing for Shergold's attention to process and for all the ghoulish details. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: 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. Read more

Noel Murray, AV Club: Handsomely crafted and well-acted, but its sense of scale is as constricted as a noose. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: 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. Read more

Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times: At once desperately grim and unnervingly gripping, providing an exacting sense of the detail and procedure that went into death by hanging. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: This measured bio-production might be viewed as a lesser companion piece to Vera Drake -- although in the case of Pierrepoint, all the period-piece tastefulness makes for a story more instructive than emotionally tangible. Read more

Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: 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. Read more

Gene Seymour, Newsday: The movie hits its message a little too emphatically, and its narrative unwinds a little too schematically. But Spall's performance, along with that of Juliet Stevenson as his devoted and sometimes credulous spouse, keeps things grounded. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: It's Timothy Spall who really carries the film. Read more

Jack Mathews, New York Daily News: Whether the real Pierrepoint, who died in 1992, had a clear conscience, the portly Spall creates the perfect impression of a quietly decent, proud man who is overwhelmed by unwanted celebrity and by one too many jerking ropes. Read more

V.A. Musetto, New York Post: You have to wonder just how true to life the melodramatic depiction of these events is. Read more

Rex Reed, New York Observer: Pierrepoint turns a morbid subject into a fascinating case study of the last official prison executioner in England. The result is both a balanced, carefully researched film and a thoughtful, reflective treatise on capital punishment. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: 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. Read more

Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle: Grim and disturbing yet perversely riveting. Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: [The film's] grittiness instantly adds to the historically and socio-economically convincing picture of working-class Yorkshire in the last century. Read more

Susan Walker, Toronto Star: 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. Read more

Wally Hammond, Time Out: What the film does have, however, is the courage of its dark convictions; it's a bleak subject and, commendably, the director doesn't shy away from it. Read more

Margaret Lyons, Time Out: Read more

David Fear, Time Out: Read more

Leslie Felperin, Variety: 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. Read more