Callas Forever Reviews
Top CriticMost of the budget seems to have gone to the moments of Carmen that we see; they look sumptuous and robust, and the surrounding film looks, well, like a low-budget art movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
St. Paul Pioneer Press
The movie's fantasy plot doesn't tell us anything about the woman. And her appearance and voice were so distinctive that it's distracting to see her voice matched up with the wrong face.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
EricDSnider.com
Nothing more than Zeffirelli's wish-fulfillment, pretending to stage a production of 'Carmen' with Fanny Ardant acting as proxy for his late, great star.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
FilmJerk.com
The contact high from the performances is exhilarating, but there too many inconsistencies here to concentrate on the portrait Zeffirelli is attempting to paint.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
culturevulture.net
A breathtaking act of betrayal and hypocrisy, of self-aggrandizement and simple bad taste.
Palo Alto Weekly
Badly crafted filmmaking with a curiously convivial side.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
A lip-synching hall of mirrors, it is essentially a piece of highbrow karaoke.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
On about five different levels, Callas Forever constitutes grave robbery.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It's a small-scale premise for a movie and, given its wooden, dubbed dialogue (a supreme irony), it's an experience purely for Callas fans.
For all the devotion Zeffirelli professes to Callas' legacy, the script reduces her to a cartoon.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
A film that forgets to bring its central character to life.
| Original Score: C
Groucho Reviews
The Carmen sequences, though consistent with Callas Forever's washed-out '70s look, have a beauty and immediacy which the rest of the film lacks.
| Original Score: 2/4
Film Threat
Fanny Ardant barely recalls the glory of the celebrated diva.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
Boulder Weekly
Callas may be forever, but Franco Zeffirelli's fictionalized tribute is not.
By aspiring no higher than campy adulation, it ill serves the memory of the most storied opera diva of the last century.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
Zeffirelli's 'Carmen' looks more PBS than MGM, and this relative poverty helps explain why this sincere but bloodless film has taken three years to limp into theaters.
| Original Score: 2/4
Slant Magazine
Zeffirelli hides behind the closet door of the film's gaudy Carmen scenes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Sadly, this camp drama, a eulogy by one of Callas's closest friends, pales in comparison to the four minutes of 'La Mamma Morta' in Philadelphia.
