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Evita

EMAILPRINTBuena Vista Pictures

Evita reviews
45
7.0 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 24 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 7 votes
Read user comments
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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)

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...

90

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.

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88

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.

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75

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.

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75

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.

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75

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.

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70

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.

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70

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.

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63

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]

60

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.

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50

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.

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50

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.

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50

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.

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50

Salon.com Laura Miller

Lloyd Webber is everything loud, dumb and tiresome, and everything loud, dumb and tiresome in Evita is him.

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50

Newsweek David Ansen

It's gorgeous. It's epic. It's spectacular. But two hours later, it also proves to be emotionally impenetrable.

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42

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.

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40

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.

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40

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.

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40

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.

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40

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).

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40

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.

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30

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.

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30

Dallas Observer Peter Rainer

As an actress, Madonna has to work on her vulnerability more.

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25

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.

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0

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.

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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.

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