It's pretty sad when the scene on a movie poster is the best and only decent part of a film, but that was my impression with "The Last."
New York's Central Park provides an attractive backdrop to the initial footage in this production, and it gives you some hope that the movie might be heading in an interesting direction. But the film goes seriously downhill from there.
To its credit, "The Last" is one of the few movies in recent memory to star a nonagenarian, the attractive actress Rebecca Schull. I celebrated this fact till I saw that Ms. Schull's screen time was marked by stultifyingly dull and discursive dialogue. Indeed, this movie is numbingly talky, without giving the viewer a reason to care. ("The Last" leaves "My Dinner with Andre" looking like an edge-of-your-seat popcorn thriller.)
Ms. Schull's performance is all right, but I found most of the acting in this film to be uniformly bad, particularly when it came to a younger female character who plays a loud-mouthed and self-satisfied convert to Judaism. I wanted to run away.
I caught this movie at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan, which usually offers some stellar works that aren't easily located elsewhere. You can bet this is "The Last" time I'll be checking this movie out!
