The Last Castle

It's an even rarer pleasure to see a film that combines exciting action with a smart, well-informed script and vivid yet restrained performances. more

It could have been more, could have been a triumph and a classic, instead of simply an effective entertainment. more

Not as simple as it looks, though its appeal is simple: Robert Redford goes to prison, and James Gandolfini ("The Sopranos") is the warden. That's a movie worth seeing right there. more

The kind of movie you can enjoy easily enough, as long as you don't think about it much.

Like Lurie's previous two films, it's also simplistic and somewhat muddled. more

Lurie manages, despite these obstacles, to inspire Redford to give one of the most layered and interesting performances of his career. more

Engrossing if standard-issue prison drama. more

If this melodrama has that haven't-we-met-before look, it's because it combines elements of "The Caine Mutiny" (Gandolfini's Winter is Queeg-like) with those of "Stalag 17." more

A disappointingly pedestrian prison meller that falls between stools artistically and politically. more

This is, after all, not just Robert Redford. It's Redford in the nobly burnished self-mythologic perfection of his late-middle-aged golden god-ness. more

The film stars Robert Redford as a 3-star general who has been stripped of his rank and sent to a military prison run by James Gandolfini of "The Sopranos" fame. From the beginning there is conflict between the two men as Redford views Gandolfini as a tin soldier who has never been in real battles. As the film goes on, we see Gandolfini as nothing short of a sadist who punishes the men severely for every infraction of his silly rules. The story moves fast and the audience identifies with the plight of the men who have lost their pride in being soldiers. Redford orchestrates psychological... more

Director Rod Lurie's follow-up of "The Contender" raises his patriotic tone higher than before, and gives an intriguging setting of the film, but as he did before, sacrifices its potentially complex nature of patriotism. Instead of making full use of the interesting situation, "The Last Castle" goes in a very familar territory where many previous prison dramas have treaded before. But ... here's an irony ... the film is very engaging and entertaining as the latter. Robert Redford is General Irwin (and three-star general), who disobeyed a direct order from the President and was found guilty... more

"The Last Castle" is among one of the best prison dramas that I have ever seen since...ever! It is so thrilling, so entertaining that you would have to see it again and again! And Robert Redford's performance just couldn't be better! "The Last Castle" focuses on General Eugene Irwin (Redford) a three-star general who is being sent to a military prison for defying a presidential order, but did so heroically. There, he meets Colonel Winter (an excellent James Gandolfini), who has the utmost amount of respect for the general. Winter is a man who has never seen combat, and when Irwin sneeks a... more