Synopsis
A retired businesswoman – who tries to control everything around her – decides to write her own obituary. A young journalist takes up the task of finding out the truth, and the result is a life-altering friendship.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Shirley MacLaineHarriet Lauler
- Amanda SeyfriedAnne Sherman
- Anne HecheElizabeth
- Thomas SadoskiRobin Sands
- Philip Baker HallEdward
- Adina PorterBree Wilson
- Sarah BakerZoe
- Tom Everett ScottRonald Odom
- Gedde WatanabeLouie the gardener
- Joel MurrayJoe Mueller
Recommendations
- 60
Variety
Watching MacLaine’s Harriet embrace her life, after spending too much time rejecting it, leads The Last Word to a touching finish. MacLaine has something that shines through and elevates a film like this one. The movie is prefab indie whimsy, but she gives it an afterglow. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
If you must make another entirely predictable comedy about an unapologetic old white curmudgeon who steamrolls all opposition, you can't do better than draft the redoubtable Shirley MacLaine to keep audiences in her barbed corner while we wait for her inevitable bittersweet humanization. - 50
Screen Daily
Offering predictably heartfelt messages about seizing the day, The Last Word can be very sweet and funny, but its lightness starts to feel cloying rather than ebullient. - 50
Los Angeles Times
What initially augured a spiky portrait of late-age restlessness recedes into a woefully generic case of shopworn cross-generational uplift, sprinkled with tired wisecracks. - 50
Entertainment Weekly
Shirley MacLaine’s well-deserved reputation as a salty, snappy grand dame — forged from later-career work like "Terms of Endearment," "Steel Magnolias," "Postcards from the Edge," "Bernie", etc. — unfortunately precedes her in this sloppy, saccharine drama costarring Amanda Seyfried. - 50
RogerEbert.com
This is, among other things, something of a fatty movie. It goes out of its way to hit “beats” that it presumes will be satisfying to a mainstream audience. - 50
The A.V. Club
Pellington, a music video veteran who was once known for inconsistent-but-diverting thrillers like The Mothman Prophecies and Arlington Road, doesn’t show much interest in making either of movie’s central relationships work, leaning on the brittle, snappy MacLaine to carry almost every scene. - 45
TheWrap
If nothing else, The Last Word demonstrates that Shirley MacLaine still has the comic chops and screen presence that have made her a Hollywood legend.
