| 63 |
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
It's a movie of elegant surfaces, great background music (by both the Mahlers), gossipy underpinnings and pretensions to romantic grandeur.
|
| 63 |
Miami Herald
Connie Ogle
The music is of course majestic, blending well with a loving cinematography.
|
| 63 |
Boston Globe
Jay Carr
Botches the chance to delve into the personality of a complex, alluring, and free-spirited woman.
|
| 58 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
A rather dull movie.
|
| 50 |
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
The stifling piety of this film -- which regards anything old and vaguely arty as next to sacred -- needs some serious airing out.
|
| 50 |
LA Weekly
Chuck Wilson
She 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.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
There's great music and lovely settings, but the filmmakers have done little more with their subject than reiterate the Britannica's description of her.
|
| 50 |
The New York Times
Dana Stevens
For 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.
|
| 50 |
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
Was Alma a masochist? Repressed? Neurotic? A pre-feminist? Don't look for insight here.
|
| 50 |
Washington Post
Philip Kennicott
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.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
Stiff but handsome film, there's little sense of the conflict and complexities that drove Alma Mahler.
|
| 40 |
Los Angeles Times
Kevin Thomas
Mildly entertaining, offering generous swaths of Mahler performed by the Bratislava Philharmonic, but it's also inescapably ponderous.
|
| 40 |
Village Voice
Michael Atkinson
A standard-issue fin de siècle costume parade, simplifying every dramatic transaction to a torpid minimum but never answering its own looming "why": Why Alma?
|
| 40 |
Austin Chronicle
Marrit Ingman
Somehow the film doesn't quite cohere; it's hobbled by its awkward exposition, with salient facts about the characters' lives.
|
| 40 |
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
The movie fails to make Alma a vivid presence -- She deserves better, and so do viewers.
|
| 40 |
New York Magazine
Peter Rainer
Beresford, 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.
|
| 38 |
USA Today
Staff [Not Credited]
Stuffing 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.
|
| 30 |
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
A fascinating premise. And yet, the movie, directed by Bruce Beresford, never quite blooms.
|
| 30 |
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
Ms. 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.
|
| 30 |
New Times (L.A.)
Bill Gallo
Moviegoers 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.
|
| 30 |
Chicago Reader
Lisa Alspector
Director Bruce Beresford -- not intending to be funny but succeeding wildly.
|
| 25 |
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
A sodden ''feminist'' vulgarization.
|
| 25 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Joshua Kosman
The only performer who breathes any life into the proceedings is Vincent Perez.
|
| 20 |
Mr. Showbiz
Kevin Maynard
Slow as a funeral dirge, the movie's all talk about art and passion and obsession without anything to show for it.
|
| 20 |
Variety
Robert Koehler
An odd case of filmmaking with a crystal-clear subject but no guiding dramatic premise.
|
| 12 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
The movie has three tones: overwrought, boring, laughable.
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