Buena Vista Social Club
Metascore
81 out of 100

Universal acclaim - based on 19 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 17 out of 19
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 19
  3. Negative: 0 out of 19
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  1. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Peter Stack
    100
    A poetry of love, longing and affirmation bleeds through the music of Cuba, and some of the best sounds the island ever created are captured with embracing humanity.
  2. New Times (L.A.)
    Reviewed by: Hal Hinson
    100
    Infectious, intoxicating joy is the emotion conveyed in every frame of this ravishing, exuberant documentary.
  3. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    90
    I've never seen another movie that so clearly expresses the sensual sustenance that great folk culture provides its practitioners.
  4. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    90
    Being able to hear this kind of playing is a special moment in time, one we don't want to end and one that we're privileged to experience.
  5. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Stephen Holden
    90
    The concert scenes find the stage awash in such intense joy, camaraderie and nationalist pride that you become convinced that making music is a key to longevity and spiritual well-being.
  6. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: David Denby
    90
    The movie comes closer to pure happiness than anything else in the theatres at the moment, and it has an intriguing and moving subtext: the Cubans' buried but irrepressible love of things American.
  7. San Francisco Examiner
    Reviewed by: Philip Elwood
    88
    A 140-minute film masterpiece.
  8. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Merle Bertrand
    80
    This soothing, elegantly-crafted film is such a marvelous piece of work.
  9. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: John Payne
    80
    Buena Vista avoids literal politics, as if all that is beside this film's point.
  10. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Richard Gehr
    80
    Feels like a timeless blast from the past.
  11. Newsweek
    Reviewed by: Thomas Hayden
    80
    The film is short on biographical details and the history of the music, and long on impressions of the musicians' character and motivations.
  12. Variety
    Reviewed by: Eddie Cockrell
    80
    Wenders lets the music and the sprightly people who make it speak for themselves, although the director's ongoing fascination with the urban environment is in top form as the camera serenely cruises the streets of Havana, often at a velvety dusk.
  13. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    80
    The players and their stories are as wonderful as the music, and the filmmaking is uncommonly sensitive and alert.
  14. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Alejandro Riera
    75
    At the end, we're left with a desire to hear even more of this music and hang out a little longer with these musicians.
  15. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Sandra Contreras
    70
    Cleverly mixes footage from various recording sessions and interviews with live performances in Amsterdam and New York City's Carnegie Hall.
  16. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Russell Smith
    67
    Buena Vista Social Club is obviously intended less as a concert film than as a set of cinematic liner notes about the vanishing musical culture.
  17. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    67
    What the film leaves unexplained is how this joyous musical outpouring, which predated the revolution, could fare under a system with a pathological distrust of beauty.
  18. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    50
    It is a touching story, and the musicians (some over 90 years old) still have fire and grace onstage, but, man, does the style of this documentary get in the way.
  19. Film.com
    Reviewed by: Norman Green
    50
    Lacks dramatic tension and fails to bring this great music alive. It does not sing.

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