Average Rating: 6.3/10
Reviews Counted: 99
Fresh: 70 | Rotten: 29
A complex meditation on family dynamics, Tetro's arresting visuals and emotional core compensate for its uneven narrative.
Average Rating: 6.3/10
Critic Reviews: 28
Fresh: 20 | Rotten: 8
A complex meditation on family dynamics, Tetro's arresting visuals and emotional core compensate for its uneven narrative.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 10,930
On the heels of the self-financed, modestly budgeted 2007 drama Youth Without Youth -- his first directorial outing after a ten-year hiatus -- filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola remains situated in the director's chair for this semi-autobiographical family drama concerning an artistic family of immigrants whose fierce rivalries span several generations. Vincent Gallo stars with newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, with Carmen Maura, Maribel Verdú, and Alden Ehrenreich rounding out the cast. ~ Jason Buchanan,
Jun 11, 2009 Wide
May 4, 2010
$0.3M
American Zoetrope
All Critics (99) | Top Critics (28) | Fresh (73) | Rotten (29) | DVD (5)
Unabashedly theatrical and richly cinematic, even when it's falling apart...
While Coppola seems revitalized by quoting from movies he studied at UCLA film school, what ultimately makes Tetro so compelling is the filmmaker's return to the motifs that made his 1970s films powerful.
What makes it eminently watchable is the craft. Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. films in luscious widescreen monochrome that looks almost wet. Osvaldo Golijov's score is another pleasure.
It is interesting. Better, it is quite possibly great.
Tetro percolates with energy and bawdy knockabout humor.
Visually inventive, narratively edgy, and unlike anything else.
It's a deeply personal picture that's overflowing with exuberance and passion and is the director's best work in over twenty years.
Funny, haunting, strange and striking in equal measure, Tetro is a triumph that reconfirms Francis Ford Coppola's position as one of the great American filmmakers...
Shot mostly in a chiaroscuro black and white, with color interludes for the flashbacks and for surreal ballet sequences in the mode of Michael Powell's The Red Shoes, Tetro rewards the eye.
A dazzling stylistic exercise, Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro pays tribute to great bygone European filmmakers.
There is not enough dramatic tension to sustain the film for two hours and conjectures about the Coppola family saga are really extraneous to the experience of Tetro.
Incidents take a back seat to the main event, which is Francis Ford Coppola swooshing ideas and feelings about fathers, sons, blood ties and artistic accomplishment around in a big wine glass.
Stylish, involving and intensely personal, the film really gets under the skin with its emotional story and powerfully visual tone.
Coppola may be working on, for him, a smallish budget (reportedly around $15 million) but that doesn't mean his usual craftsmanship has abated. The film is sleekly shot and edited.
Coppola's fascination with family ties and guilty secrets is at the heart of a grandiose but half-baked saga that doffs its cap to the florid theatricality of Powell and Pressburger and Sixties Italian classics such as La Dolce Vita.
The way ahead could be for Coppola père et fils to stay away from personal themes. Family isn't everything.
Frustrating and fitfully compelling, Tetro may not be a return to former glories, but this is Coppola through and through, an over-ambitious effort about thwarted ambition, full of ideas and passion, and smitten with cinema.
It would be kindest to ignore Tetro.
Though it's unlikely to announce his return to the grand stage of big-budget cinema, the movie is graced with touches of the old Coppola magic.
Tetro is a movie filled with splashes of brilliance rather than being a plain brilliant movie.
Coppola is a shadow of the director he used to be. The use of black-and-white here only shows that more starkly.
Carlo: What has happened to our family? Bennie: Rivalry. "Every family has a past."Tetro is a beautifully shot and acted film. It is filmed in black and white against, with Argentina as a setting. The career of Francis Ford Coppola is filled with masterpieces and a couple disasters, most notably Jack. Tetro is
November 1, 2011
Super Reviewer
When is this fucking picture supposed to take place? 1970's? 1940's? now? judging by Vincent's outfits, it should be 1979, except he dresses like that everyday on and off the sets of movies. i think his mother brought him home from the hospital with women's bell-bottoms and red boots on. its pretty funny to watch him
December 3, 2009Super Reviewer
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