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Currently Reading Flag Day Review: Sean Penn Directs a Powerful Father-Daughter Drama That Reveals Dylan Penn to Be a Major Actor
The actor-director is in top form in this wrenching true-life tale of love dancing with dysfunction.
Owen Gleiberman, provided by
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Director: Sean Penn
With: Sean Penn, Dylan Penn, Katheryn Winnick, Josh Brolin, Norbert Leo Butz, Jadyn Rylee, Hopper Jack Penn, Regina King, Cole Flynn, Beckam Crawford, Bailey Noble, James Juce, Dale Dickey.
Allen Fraser
As a filmmaker, Sean Penn has always had a flinty integrity, but the movies he directs work so hard to channel the values of ’70s films they’re moody and fatalistic, with furrowed brows, and move at a pace of drop-dead deliberation that early on, in the days of “The Indian Runner” (1991) and “The Crossing Guard” (1995), you could just about feel the sweat of his downbeat virtue. I think that changed when Penn made “Into the Wild” (2007),