‘Flag Day’ Review: Sean Penn Directs a Powerful Father-Daughter Drama That Reveals Dylan Penn to Be a Major Actor
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticAs 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), a film as dark as any other film in his desolation row (it was about a young man withdrawing from the world — mind, body, and soul), but it was directed with an open-eyed adventure and skill that turned it enthralling.