When journalists like myself wrote Cannes previews spotlighting the films we were most excited to see at the festival this year, very few of us mentioned The Last Face, the new film from director Sean Penn. Our intuition was correct: This turgid romantic drama starring Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem is a dud that also does a terrible job making us care about atrocities across war-torn Africa. No sale. My review is up at Screen International.
