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Evita
EMAILPRINTBuena Vista Pictures

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 24 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 7 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Musical
Written by:
Alan Parker
Oliver Stone
Tim Rice (play Evita)
Directed by: Alan Parker
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 25, 1996
DVD: March 24, 1998
Running Time: 134 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG for thematic elements, images of violence and some mild language
Starring Madonna, Antonio Banderas, Jonathan Pryce, Jimmy Nail, Victoria Sus, Julian Littman, Olga Merediz, and Laura Pallas
Madonna stars in the riveting true-life story of Eva Peron, who rose above childhood poverty and a scandalous past to achieve unimaginable fortune and fame. (BV Entertainment)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Angela's Ashes Mississippi Burning The Life of David Gale
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Time Richard Corliss
But this Evita is not just a long, complex music video; it works and breathes like a real movie, with characters worthy of our affection and deepest suspicions.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
But Parker's visuals enliven the music, and Madonna and Banderas bring it passion. By the end of the film we feel like we've had our money's worth, and we're sure Evita has.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
This brash, glitzy, energetic entertainment has the power to hold an audience enraptured, but, at the same time, there's a sense that what we're experiencing is just candy for the eyes and ears.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Octavio Roca
Alan Parker's picture is epic, lavish and fascinating. It is not a perfect screen musical, but it is spectacular and it works.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Staff(not credited)
Alan Parker's big-budget adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's surpassingly shrewd stage spectacular isn't a big fat failure. But it isn't a resounding success, either: It's an awkward hybrid, neither lavish eye candy nor credible drama.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Director Alan Parker has done a dazzling job creating screen images to accompany the wall-to-wall music, resulting in a musical fresco that is much closer to a sophisticated filmed opera than to any conventional tuner.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Richard Harrington
Evita is a busy movie with an often noisy soundtrack that can get tedious and monotonous (particularly in the second half), but it's just as likely to sweep one away with its musical, emotional and historical momentum.
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
So fluidly visual that only a deathbed finale can flag its pace, it's the first Panavision music video to run 21/4 hours, the monotony finally sapping its staying power. [23 Dec 1996 Pg.01.D]
Empire Angie Errigo
Madonna knocks herself out and deserves cheers for the emotional range and humanity with which she sings in Alan Parker's spectacular film. But whether you think the movie is great or grisly, rests in large part on your palate for Andrew Lloyd Webber's music.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Elvis Mitchell
But the film is still breathless and shrill, since Alan Parker's direction shows no signs of a moral or political compass and remains in exhausting overdrive all the time.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The movie takes no particular stance on the controversies surrounding its heroine, seen by some as a self-serving egomaniac and others as a tireless champion of the poor. Nor can much insight be gleaned from Madonna's energetic but oddly impersonal performance.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
The movie is such a chore because watching actors strain to wrap their mouths around prerecorded songs for 134 minutes is irritating and, worse, alienating.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Laura Miller
Lloyd Webber is everything loud, dumb and tiresome, and everything loud, dumb and tiresome in Evita is him.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
It's gorgeous. It's epic. It's spectacular. But two hours later, it also proves to be emotionally impenetrable.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Technically, Madonna's singing is beautiful -- elegant, silky, refined. Yet there's no fire, no twinkle of ambitious joy, to her performance. Her face is fixed, almost tranquilized -- a porcelain mask.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Without real dialogue and believable connections between actors, Evita is limited in its effectiveness, and all the crying for Argentina in the world can't change that.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Maria Schneider
Its political insights are half-hearted at best, and as entertainment it fails to excite. The songs sound mostly like glam-rock relics.
Read Full Review >Slate Louis Menand
Movie audiences today may want a little more, and the fundamental problem with the movie is that there is nothing in the story, as Rice and Lloyd Webber have designed it, to engage our feelings.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Experiencing Evita is like watching one uninterrupted long-form music video divided only by different arias or costume changes (of which there are untold numbers).
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
There are moments when music and lyrics bear only the faintest relation to each other, a tricky state of affairs in a work that is almost bereft of spoken dialogue.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Megan Rosenfeld
It is long, it is loud, it has enough extras to fill a small country, and it has more costumes than a New Orleans Mardi Gras. For 130 minutes it bludgeons you into submission; when it's over, you are numb.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Peter Rainer
As an actress, Madonna has to work on her vulnerability more.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Examiner Barbara Shulgasser
Unfortunately, this movie needed an attractive, irresistibly charismatic performer to give us some reason for watching. Madonna is made up to look like Eva, but this is hardly enough to carry the movie.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Alonso M. gave it a9:
Excellent music, good Madonna performance, nice edition.
Steven gave it a4:
Bad transition from a play to a film, the play was good, the movie NOT.
Seamus S. gave it a6:
I give this a positive review only for the pure ambition that went into making it. At moments, it has some of the most cinematicaly moving shots ever commited to film. The only problem being is that after a good hour and a half of nothing but "CRAZY" music, you really do long for some dry dialouge.
