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88An enchantingly beautiful and moving film.
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80A runaway hit in France last year and the country's official Oscar entry, is a well-nigh irresistible film celebrating the redemptive power of music.
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75Like all good popular entertainments, the best of it sings.
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75Extremely goodhearted, if not exactly original or exciting.
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75Heartfelt, but not to the degree that it becomes cloying.
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75This is a formula film with panache.
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75A movie you've seen many times before, but the setting is different, its characters are well drawn and it delivers its uplifting message with succinctness, sincerity and skill.
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70An appealing lead performance from its leading man and a wonderfully sentimental, if overly familiar, story line are the chief virtues of this French drama, a huge success in its native country.
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70Larded over with le fromage, which is to say, French cheese. But as these dairy products go, Christophe Barratier's movie is delectable sentiment. Audiences will crumble into itty-bitty pieces of Roquefort watching this.
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70The excellent cast in Christophe Barratier's loose remake of a 1945 Jean Dreville film ensures that the predictable, nostalgic ride remains enjoyable throughout.
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63Does it by the numbers, so efficiently this feels more like a Hollywood wannabe than a French film. Where's the quirkiness, the nuance, the deeper levels?
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63There's very little in The Chorus you haven't seen before, but the movie's depth of sentiment -- especially its profound humanism -- makes it worth experiencing again.
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63A crowd pleaser, even if it is unremarkable.
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63Like "Mr. Holland's Opus," only in French, with an all-boy cast in white shirts and short pants, The Chorus is the kind of sugary, crowd-pleasing fare that only the most curmudgeonly moviegoer can frown upon.
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63It's basically just another watered-down version of Dead Poets Society and countless other inspirational-teacher films, but its emotional impact is undeniable.
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60Barratier has assembled an unforgettable gallery of faces both young and old, and prolific character actor Berleand plays the perfect villain.
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60There’s little interest in probing characterisation, but the plot progress is steady and the performances likeable.
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60Most of the film, a debut feature directed by Christophe Barratier, is quite shamelessly formulaic. The Chorus redeems itself, though, with Mr. Jugnot's astute, understated performance.
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58In the end, it's a perfectly decent, perfectly vaporous film, pretty but slight, predictable but never incompetent.
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50A shameless heart-tugger from France, The Chorus leaves no cliché unturned.
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The film is finally a letdown.
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50The crime of The Chorus isn't that it's corny. (I like corny.) It's that its corniness seems programmed.
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50Unabashedly sentimental and just as unabashedly cliched.
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50This kindly and spirited film doesn't exactly break the mold of the heartwarming, humanistic boarding-school dramedy.
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50The Chorus is sham art and questionable entertainment, but at the very least it sends you whistling out of the theater.
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50The Chorus plucks desperately at the heartstrings, but fails to breathe new life into a tired old tune.
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Did nobody involved in this project notice that it was retreading a very deep groove?
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50A deeply conventional story about truculent or orphaned boys and the gentle soul who finds himself by shaping the tots into a chorus.
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50No stereotype is left unheralded and no heartstring left untugged in this freely adapted remake of Jean Dreville's mostly forgotten "La cage aux rossignols"
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Might have gone down as an endearing fable, if only the route to its finale had been less cliched.
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42The movie is rotten the way that only a denatured made-for-export slice of Gallic nostalgia can be.
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The cinematic equivalent of filtered water, The Chorus is all smooth, nutrient-free clichés. This shamelessly globalized French Oscar submission even opens with a shot of an American flag--perhaps an unconscious declaration of defeat for importable Gallic cinema.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 19 out of 21
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Mixed: 2 out of 21
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Negative: 0 out of 21
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EstebanF.9
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KathyC.10Like Coach Carter, but for music. It's much better if you watch it in french with subtitles. AMAZING! I loved the music! :)
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10