Critic Reviews

Is the fare for The Last Bus worth it? Spall’s performance ensures that the answer is a resounding yes! But, there is a caveat: viewers certainly shouldn’t expect a ride filled with joy and laughter.

As beautiful as some of the landscapes are, and as brilliant as Spall is in repose, there is only so much sitting on a bus looking wistful that one actor can do. Other than Spall’s steady gaze and some mood-book photography, The Last Bus has little to recommend it.

Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this weirdly unreal and sentimental Britmovie in the last-journey-with-someone’s-ashes genre. But it is certainly acted with commitment and integrity by Timothy Spall.

The journey is a nice excuse to paint Tom into a cheerily cosmopolitan portrait of the UK.

For a tender movie that follows an old man on a long and demanding multi-bus excursion to honor his late wife’s wishes, the placid affair has curiously little emotional range, and an even narrower sense of stakes