Flag Day Review — Flag Day (2021) Film Review, a movie directed by Sean Penn and starring Sean Penn, Dylan Penn, Josh Brolin, Regina King, Tom Anniko, Addison Tymec, Katheryn Winnick, Cole Flynn, Beckam Crawford, Jadyn Rylee, Rick Skene, Bailey Noble, James Russo, Dale Dickey, Hopper Penn and Norbert Leo Butz. Sean Penn has given [...]
Continue reading: Film Review: Flag Day (2021): Sean Penn Delivers a Powerful Family Drama...
Continue reading: Film Review: Flag Day (2021): Sean Penn Delivers a Powerful Family Drama...
- 8/23/2021
- by Thomas Duffy
- Film-Book
This review of “Flag Day” was first published after the film’s July 2021 premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sean Penn has served on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, leading the panel that gave the 2008 Palme d’Or to the French drama “The Class.” He’s acted in a number of films that have played the fest, including Terrence Malick’s 2011 Palme winner “The Tree of Life.” And he’s been in the Main Competition section as a director twice in the past, for “The Pledge” in 2001 and “The Last Face” in 2016.
All of that makes him a familiar face on the Croisette — but the last of those films also makes him a Cannes vet with something to prove. “The Last Face” was booed at its Cannes press screening and eviscerated by reviewers, with TheWrap’s Ben Croll calling it “a spectacularly misjudged mix of humanitarian intentions and gonzo-terrible execution.
Sean Penn has served on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, leading the panel that gave the 2008 Palme d’Or to the French drama “The Class.” He’s acted in a number of films that have played the fest, including Terrence Malick’s 2011 Palme winner “The Tree of Life.” And he’s been in the Main Competition section as a director twice in the past, for “The Pledge” in 2001 and “The Last Face” in 2016.
All of that makes him a familiar face on the Croisette — but the last of those films also makes him a Cannes vet with something to prove. “The Last Face” was booed at its Cannes press screening and eviscerated by reviewers, with TheWrap’s Ben Croll calling it “a spectacularly misjudged mix of humanitarian intentions and gonzo-terrible execution.
- 8/18/2021
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
“Flag Day” starts and ends with a high-stakes car chase, but that big pursuit is an anomaly. A minor-key movie less invested in grand gestures than the intimate two-hander at its center, “Flag Day” isn’t about crimes so much as the personal toll they take on innocent bystanders. Sean Penn’s first directorial effort since 2016’s “The Last Face” compensates for that misstep, if only just, with that lays out most of its emotional cards from the first act and offers few surprises along the way. In the process, however, it allows Penn to pass his talent to the next generation, with his daughter Dylan Penn taking the lead in a stirring turn that injects the central family tension with authenticity.
The younger Penn plays real-life journalist Jennifer Vogel, whose 2014 tome “Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life” has been faithfully adapted by screenwriters Jez...
The younger Penn plays real-life journalist Jennifer Vogel, whose 2014 tome “Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life” has been faithfully adapted by screenwriters Jez...
- 7/10/2021
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
As a filmmaker, Sean Penn has always had a flinty integrity, but the movies he directs work so hard to channel the values of ’70s films — they’re moody and fatalistic, with furrowed brows, and move at a pace of drop-dead deliberation — that early on, in the days of “The Indian Runner” (1991) and “The Crossing Guard” (1995), you could just about feel the sweat of his downbeat virtue. I think that changed when Penn made “Into the Wild” (2007), a film as dark as any other film in his desolation row, but it was directed with an open-eyed adventure and skill that turned it enthralling. After that, Penn made his one and only dud, but now he’s back with “Flag Day,” his sixth feature as a director in 30 years, and it’s one of his best.
It’s suffused with what you might call the Penn Darkness Factor. “Flag Day” tells...
It’s suffused with what you might call the Penn Darkness Factor. “Flag Day” tells...
- 7/10/2021
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Director Sean Penn returns to the Cannes Film Festival today in the official competition with the first film he has ever directed in which he also stars.
Flag Day actually is a solid and worthwhile effort for him both as actor and director. But first and foremost, it will be remembered as a dazzling showcase for the acting talents of his daughter, Dylan Penn, who takes on the key role in a real-life story based on Jennifer Vogel’s memoir, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life.
Dylan plays Jennifer (she shares the role with Addison Tymec at age 6 and Jadyn Rylee at ages 11-13) as the film becomes a story of a unique bond between a daughter and a messed-up but charismatic father, who spent years in prison for a bank robbery, was a grand schemer and dreamer, and who became the most notorious counterfeiter in US history,...
Flag Day actually is a solid and worthwhile effort for him both as actor and director. But first and foremost, it will be remembered as a dazzling showcase for the acting talents of his daughter, Dylan Penn, who takes on the key role in a real-life story based on Jennifer Vogel’s memoir, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life.
Dylan plays Jennifer (she shares the role with Addison Tymec at age 6 and Jadyn Rylee at ages 11-13) as the film becomes a story of a unique bond between a daughter and a messed-up but charismatic father, who spent years in prison for a bank robbery, was a grand schemer and dreamer, and who became the most notorious counterfeiter in US history,...
- 7/10/2021
- by Pete Hammond
- Deadline Film + TV
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