Mirren, Plumber Dazzle as Tolstoy and the Mrs.

Critics are hopping aboard at The Last Station, a lively drama about Leo Tolstoy's final days starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren. Here’s what they’re saying:

• “The arrival of a movie with as much intelligence and artistry as The Last Station should also be accompanied by the sound of trumpets,” writes an ebullient Rex Reed for The New York Observer. “ This movie is passionate, profound and unforgettable.”

• Nearly every critic raves about Mirren, who “is a lusty roaring wonder” playing Tolstoy’s long-suffering wife, writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. “To watch her threaten, cajole, and seduce her husband is a treat Oscar voters cannot ignore.”
• Plummer’s Tolstoy is great, too—he’s “warmly and disarmingly life-sized,” writes Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal. He calls the movie “a lovely quicksilver version of literary history.”
• But AO Scott of the New York Times is less impressed. “You will certainly see better acting” in other movies, he writes, “but it is unlikely you will see more. To say the actors overdo it would be an understatement.”

(More The Last Station stories.)