San Francisco Chronicle by Ruthe Stein

Unlike Sean Penn's demagogue in "All the King's Men," you're able to forget that Whitaker is acting. He embodies the role. When clips of the real Amin are shown at the end, it's almost shocking to realize the extent to which Whitaker has become him.

Chicago Reader by J.R. Jones

Of course no Western director can make a movie about Africa without being accused of colonialism himself, and some critics have faulted The Last King of Scotland for focusing on its white hero as black corpses pile up around him. But although the movie takes place on an international political stage, it's still a drama of individual allegiance.

Baltimore Sun by Michael Sragow

Jumping off from the brilliant novel by Giles Foden and changing a key character entirely, it dramatizes and wrings humor from the way a white Western renegade can view a self-made Third World despot like Amin as a superman blowing fresh air into a fetid atmosphere.

Newsweek by David Ansen

Forest Whitaker, uncorking the power that he usually holds in check, gives a chilling, bravura performance as Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin, whose bloody regime slaughtered more than 300,000 people. This intelligent, sometimes gruesome thriller is based on a novel by Giles Foden.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

The film is phenomenally well directed by Kevin Macdonald and edited by Justine Wright to bring out every bit of scary volatility in the most casual interactions.

New York Post by Kyle Smith

The Last King of Scotland is a parable shocking in its truth, jolting in its lack of sentimentality, Shakespearean in its vision of the doctor's catastrophic flaw.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold

The movie is an extraordinary personal adventure that views everything through the eyes of its hero as it carries him from one apocalyptic situation to another.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

Whitaker is terrifying in a way that we recognize not from old movies but from life.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Drawing on a documentary visual style he deftly employed in "One Day in September" and "Touching the Void," director Kevin Macdonald uses McAvoy's boyishness to treat Garrigan's apolitical foolishness as yet another damn mess in one African country's hell.

Los Angeles Times by Carina Chocano

Captures the energy and exuberance of a young nation in the throes of optimism and works it into a foreboding frenzy.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

Director Kevin Macdonald has fashioned a film that is at times nearly as harrowing as his previous endeavor, "Touching the Void."

Premiere by Glenn Kenny

Whitaker's Amin is the kind of raging lunatic that only an actor who has made a specialty of quiet caginess could pull off so convincingly. It's great, and scary, to see Whitaker turn it up to 11 for once.

The Hollywood Reporter

An imaginative and original picture turns conventional as it ends.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

Furiously paced, with excellent performances by Forest Whitaker as Amin and James McAvoy as the foolish Scotsman who becomes the leader's personal physician, the film has texture, if not depth and enough intelligence to almost persuade you that it actually has something of note to say.

Village Voice

An adequate thriller redeemed by Forest Whitaker's sensational turn as Idi Amin.

The New Yorker by David Denby

Whitaker, in the performance of a lifetime, makes him (Idi Amin) a charismatic madman.

Variety by Todd McCarthy

In the end, The Last King of Scotland is much better when it plays it cool and amusing than when it tries to ramp up outrage and indignation.