The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (22) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (15) | Rotten (7)
The results are often fascinating (I love the duet of the Armed Men, sung by a chorus of faces animated out of a wall of sandbags), sometimes ludicrous and never boring.
In the end, love triumphs. In this movie, the music triumphs, proving again that a true masterpiece can survive all kinds of meddling.
Apart from a fascination with the hate-spitting mouth and throat of Lyubov Petrova's vocally pyrotechnic Queen of the Night, the visual gimmicks are individually tolerable. But they don't add up to anything particular.
Opera buffs shouldn't throw away their DVDs of Ingmar Bergman's 1975 TV movie.
Even though there were moments in The Magic Flute when I wondered if Branagh hadn't truly gone off his rocker, I found its audacity exhilarating.
It never adds up to more than a curiosity for opera fans.
Mozart in the Branagh meat grinder.
Like the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," it's all about the marriage of music and images.
It dwells quite happily somewhere in the no-man's-land between "Perfect" and "Perfectly Enjoyable."
Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute comes on strong ... maybe too strong...
A week is a long time in cinema. Last Friday saw Branagh being all but written off thanks to the ludicrous Sleuth. This week, he's hitting the high notes.
His flamboyant rendering of the Mozart opera isn't as smug and stagey as Sleuth, but it is insufferable - and 40 minutes longer.
In this adaptation of Mozart's classic opera, Tamino is fights for his love in World War I era trenches. Kenneth Brannagh, whose Shakespearean adaptations don't always use the advantages of film, makes up for it in this rendition of Mozart's opera. Visual effects abound in Brannagh's best imitation of Julie Taymor, and while some of them are effective, most of the visual stylings do little to advance the plot even though they're fun to look at. The acting and the singing are the real highlights of this film; many of the actors, particularly Benjamin Jay Davis, are able to satisfy the high demands of opera while focusing their work for the film. Overall, I enjoyed this film even though Brannagh is no Julie Taymor.
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