‘Freud’s Last Session’ Review: Anthony Hopkins Slips Easily Into Sigmund’s Skin in Talky Two-Hander
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes it’s a loaded symbol in an imagined conversation between world-famous “sex doc” Sigmund Freud (played by Anthony Hopkins, in irritable curmudgeon mode) and converted atheist C.S.
Lewis (Matthew Goode, looking slightly worse for wear). In the stage play turned only-slightly-less-stagey film, “Freud’s Last Session,” these two titans of 20th century thought meet at the psychoanalyst’s London home in early September 1939 to discuss God, father figures (both spiritual and biological) and, of course, sex.
Freud famously had a way of making everything about sex, and once he lights his cigar — a prop which Freud treats every bit as portentously as one might Chekhov’s proverbial gun — the subject effectively chases out their more gripping disagreement over faith.
Expanding only slightly upon the stuffiness of his tweedy 2015 biopic, “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” director Matthew Brown has taken the play by Mark St.
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