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Last updated: 18 Jul 2026 at 22:50 UTC

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Flag Day (2021) - Critic Reviews - Page 1 of 2

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Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Mark Asch (48) for Little White Lies (3,136) on 27 Jan 2022

The scenes of Jennifer’s childhood are endless montages, with repetitive blown-out happy-families memories and blatant Terrence Malick ripoffs…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Olly Richards (291) for Empire (3,446) on 24 Jan 2022

Far from the best of Penn’s directing work but also not the worst (The Last Face is unlikely to lose that dubious crown)…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Liam Lacey (1,725) for Original-Cin (1,156) on 31 Aug 2021

For the power of the performances and what they capture about guilt and family manipulation, Flag Day has a cathartic accuracy in many of its scenes…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Ann Hornaday (1,919) for Washington Post (9,851) on 26 Aug 2021

As a director, Penn knows how to create arresting tableaus that draw the eye and spark the viewer’s own sensory past…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Roger Moore (6,008) for Movie Nation (3,875) on 24 Aug 2021

Penn the elder has made a movie more concerned with grainy images captured in twilight than pace, more wrapped up in picture-postcard cinematography…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Glenn Kenny (1,728) for RogerEbert.com (5,563) on 20 Aug 2021

I can’t say how many liberties Penn, working from a script by Jez Butterworth and his own brother John-Henry Butterworth, took with their…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Jeannette Catsoulis (1,537) for The New York Times (9,847) on 19 Aug 2021

Penn gives him a vivid, wheedling desperation that’s weirdly moving, and the younger Penn has clearly inherited the emotional expressiveness…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Trace Sauveur (69) for Austin Chronicle (7,653) on 19 Aug 2021

Flag Day desperately wants to be an impassioned testament to the lives of both Jennifer and Dylan, but is hardly ever able to escape the myopic…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Robert Abele (1,309) for Los Angeles Times (12,977) on 19 Aug 2021

As it stretches out, it also thins, its Malick-meets-Cassavetes ambitions never rising above clichés of technique and melodrama…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Joe Morgenstern (2,395) for Wall Street Journal (3,071) on 19 Aug 2021

It’s clear what the film means to be—a bittersweet portrait of a daughter’s love for her incorrigible father…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Mick Lasalle (3,303) for San Francisco Chronicle (7,630) on 18 Aug 2021

It’s not an exciting film, and it’s not a film with some wider social relevance…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Richard Roeper (2,737) for Chicago Sun-Times (7,580) on 18 Aug 2021

In Flag Day, Sean Penn directs himself for the first time and has cast Dylan Penn, his daughter with Robin Wright, as the lead — and the…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Mike D'angelo (730) for The A.V. Club (5,644) on 17 Aug 2021

Thankfully, Flag Day isn’t another disaster, though neither is it anywhere near the vicinity of Penn’s best work…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By John Bleasdale (289) for CineVue (2,163) on 13 Jul 2021

Of the many problems the film has, it’s the different plots that never quite bounce off each other…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Steve Pond (235) for TheWrap (3,203) on 12 Jul 2021

While the film sometimes struggles with disparate tones, it’s a solid, subtle drama that opts in most cases for restraint over excess…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By David Katz (41) for The Film Stage (3,162) on 12 Jul 2021

A piece of would-be American classicism, this is a hackneyed, unevenly written hybrid between a con-man antihero drama and an emotive, heart-bruised…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Caroline Tsai (12) for The Playlist (3,871) on 11 Jul 2021

The Penn father-daughter duo undoubtedly brings an air of authenticity to the Vogels’ relationship, which is wonderful at its best and tragic…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Pat Brown (171) for Slant Magazine (8,298) on 11 Jul 2021

Flag Day is little more than a near-two-hour montage of tear-streaked faces shouting blandly melodramatic lines at each other…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Owen Gleiberman (3,271) for Variety (12,700) on 10 Jul 2021

Even telling the story of this scarred, flawed, barely together family, Penn creates honest notes of nostalgia…

Review of Flag Day (2021)

By Peter Bradshaw (3,667) for The Guardian (2,969) on 10 Jul 2021

There are some pretty broad emotional strokes here and maybe a fair bit of grandstanding. But it’s made with some style…

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Flag Day (2021) - What do the critics say?

What did the critics make of Flag Day (2021)? Do you agree with them?

Cinafilm has collected 24 reviews of Flag Day (2021) written by professional movie critics and published online or in newspapers and magazines. Read a few reviews to get the verdict from critics!

Film critics gave Flag Day (2021) an average score of 56%, indicating generally mixed reviews.

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