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90But 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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88But 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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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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75Alan 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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75This 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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70Director 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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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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63So 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]
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60Madonna 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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50The 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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50The 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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50Lloyd Webber is everything loud, dumb and tiresome, and everything loud, dumb and tiresome in Evita is him.
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50But 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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50It's gorgeous. It's epic. It's spectacular. But two hours later, it also proves to be emotionally impenetrable.
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42Technically, 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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40Experiencing 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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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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40Without 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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40Movie 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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40There 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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30As an actress, Madonna has to work on her vulnerability more.
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25Unfortunately, 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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0In 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.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 4
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Mixed: 1 out of 4
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Negative: 0 out of 4
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AlonsoM.9Excellent music, good Madonna performance, nice edition.
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9
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Steven4Bad transition from a play to a film, the play was good, the movie NOT.