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63It's a movie of elegant surfaces, great background music (by both the Mahlers), gossipy underpinnings and pretensions to romantic grandeur.
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63The music is of course majestic, blending well with a loving cinematography.
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63Botches the chance to delve into the personality of a complex, alluring, and free-spirited woman.
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58A rather dull movie.
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50There's great music and lovely settings, but the filmmakers have done little more with their subject than reiterate the Britannica's description of her.
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50Was Alma a masochist? Repressed? Neurotic? A pre-feminist? Don't look for insight here.
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50Stiff but handsome film, there's little sense of the conflict and complexities that drove Alma Mahler.
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50The stifling piety of this film -- which regards anything old and vaguely arty as next to sacred -- needs some serious airing out.
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50She is known as one of the great muses, yet director Bruce Beresford, Wynter and screenwriter Marilyn Levy are never clear if this is by design or chance.
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50For all the talk of artistic and amorous passion, the film is trapped in snobbish inertia; its idea of period drama amounts to a kind of highbrow name- dropping.
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It has moments of humor, some of them intentional, and it occasionally tugs at the heartstrings. Yet it ultimately makes real history feel ridiculously improbable.
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40The movie fails to make Alma a vivid presence -- She deserves better, and so do viewers.
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40Somehow the film doesn't quite cohere; it's hobbled by its awkward exposition, with salient facts about the characters' lives.
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40Beresford, can't bring this saga to life because Alma herself never fully comes to life; her contradictoriness, like the way she embraces Mahler only to rail against his "Jewish music," doesn't add up to a whole and complex human being.
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40A standard-issue fin de siècle costume parade, simplifying every dramatic transaction to a torpid minimum but never answering its own looming "why": Why Alma?
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40Mildly entertaining, offering generous swaths of Mahler performed by the Bratislava Philharmonic, but it's also inescapably ponderous.
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38Stuffing painters, writers and, naturally, Gustav Mahler (Jonathan Pryce) into about 90 minutes, the film comes off as little more than a handsomely mounted scorecard of sexual escapades.
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30Ms. Wynter's performance is only one of many failings in a heavily accented costume drama that Bruce Beresford has directed turgidly from Marilyn Levy's amateurish script.
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30A fascinating premise. And yet, the movie, directed by Bruce Beresford, never quite blooms.
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30Moviegoers might have preferred a little more care with the characters. As it is, Alma comes off not as a courageous trailblazer but as an indiscriminate adventuress.
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30Director Bruce Beresford -- not intending to be funny but succeeding wildly.
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The only performer who breathes any life into the proceedings is Vincent Perez.
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25A sodden ''feminist'' vulgarization.
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20Slow as a funeral dirge, the movie's all talk about art and passion and obsession without anything to show for it.
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20An odd case of filmmaking with a crystal-clear subject but no guiding dramatic premise.
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12The movie has three tones: overwrought, boring, laughable.
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