Dead Man Walking (1995)

Rolling Stone
"...Prodigious performances in an unsparing movie....Acting doesn't get much better than this..." 12/28/1995 p.139

Sight and Sound
"...A genuine sense of consolation....Profoundly moving....Sarandon has never been better...and Penn gives by far his finest performance to date..." 04/01/1996 p.40-1

Entertainment Weekly
"...[Breaks] into a terrain that can only be described as spiritual. DEAD MAN WALKING is a bold, searching, wrenching experience..." -- Rating: A 01/19/1996 pp.36-7

Entertainment Weekly
Ranked #5 in Entertainment Weekly's "10 Best Movies of 1995" 12/29/1995 pp.114-5

Variety
"...A highly intriguing drama....An intimate chamber piece for two, superbly acted by Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn....[A] mature, well-crafted movie..." 12/18/1995

USA Today
"[A]n emotionally complex drama about capital punishment." 03/16/2004 p.6D

San Francisco Chronicle 9 of 10
In Dead Man Walking, a beautiful...drama by Tim Robbins...Susan Sarandon plays Sister Helen Prejean, the real-life Roman Catholic nun who served as spiritual adviser to a death row killer at Louisiana's Angola State Prison and wrote about her experience in a 1993 book. Using the simplest of acting techniques, which looks like no technique at all, Sarandon gives a stripped-down, gloriously effective performance as Sister Helen. She acts with her eyes and heart and plays her character as a kind of budding visionary -- a woman who tries to save a man's soul and, in the process, learns more about faith and courage than she ever imagined. Acting rarely gets better than this. Sarandon, topping a decade of great performances, is luminous as the idealistic nun. She seems to have found this character at the perfect juncture in her career, and she brings to it all of her integrity and social commitment, her skill and maturity, and her gift for playing valiant, flawed women. Robbins, who made his directing debut with Bob Roberts in 1992, has translated Sister Helen's book into a superb script. He combines and conflates events and characters, updates the story from 1982 to the '90s and creates an eloquent argument against capital punishment -- without excusing the killer for his crimes. There's more to Dead Man Walking than a simple dance between a fallen man and his savior... Equally altruistic and naive, Sister Helen plunges into her task -- the redemption of a racist, neo-Nazi...without thinking how her actions will affect her fellow clergy, the African Americans with whom she works or the shattered parents of Poncelet's victims. Robbins observes the awful tension between Sister Helen and the families (Raymond J. Barry as the boy's father, R. Lee Ermey and Celia Weston as the girl's parents), demonstrates their coming to terms with her role and brings in Poncelet's anguished mother (Roberta Maxwell). In its last 20 or 25 minutes, Dead Man Walking takes a near-documentary approach in showing the details of Poncelet's execution: the last-minute tears; the walk to the execution chamber, when a guard calls out "Dead man walking"; Poncelet's being strapped to a T-shaped gurney that resembles a crucifix when it's turned on its side; the injection of lethal fluid; the last words to Sister Helen and his victims' parents. It's powerful stuff, and Sarandon, who acts as both filter and lens for the audience, makes it an extraordinary experience... There's no division between Sarandon and her character in those final scenes. It's like watching Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath or Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird -- those rare occasions when actors not only are perfectly cast but also find parts that enrich and illuminate their humanity. - Edward Guthmann
 
Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10
After seeing Dead Man Walking, I paused outside the screening to jot a final line on my notes: "This film ennobles filmmaking." That is exactly what it does. It demonstrates how a movie can confront a grave and controversial issue in our society and see it fairly, from all sides, not take any shortcuts, and move the audience to a great emotional experience without unfair manipulation. What is remarkable is that the film is also all the other things a movie should be: absorbing, surprising, technically superb and worth talking about for a long time afterward... Sister Helen, as played here by Sarandon and written and directed by Tim Robbins (from the memoir by the real Helen Prejean), is one of the few truly spiritual characters I have seen in the movies. Movies about "religion" are often only that - movies about secular organizations that deal in spirituality. It is so rare to find a movie character who truly does try to live according to the teachings of Jesus (or anyone else, for that matter) that it's a little disorienting: This character will behave according to what she thinks is right, not according to the needs of a plot, the requirements of a formula, or the pieties of those for whom religion, good grooming, polite manners and prosperity are all more or less the same thing... The movie comes down to a drama of an entirely unexpected kind: a spiritual drama, involving Matthew's soul... The performances in this film are beyond comparison, which is to say that Sarandon and Penn find their characters and make them into exactly what they are, without reference to other movies or conventions. Penn proves again that he is the most powerful actor of his generation, and, as for Sarandon, in film after film she finds not the right technique for a character so much as the right humanity. It's as if she creates a role out of a deep understanding of the person she is playing. Tim Robbins, Sarandon's longtime companion, has directed once before (Bob Roberts, an intelligent political drama). With this film he leaps far beyond his earlier work and has made that rare thing, a film that is an exercise of philosophy. This is the kind of movie that spoils us for other films, because it reveals so starkly how most movies fall into conventional routine, and lull us with the reassurance that they will not look too hard, or probe too deeply, or make us think beyond the boundaries of what is comfortable. For years, critics have asked for more films that deal with the spiritual side of life. I doubt if Dead Man Walking was what they were thinking of, but this is exactly how such a movie looks, and feels. - Roger Ebert