CNET Networks Entertainment GameSpot | GameFAQs | SportsGamer | Metacritic | MP3.com | TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games TV

DVD and Video

Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

Recent Releases in DVD and Video

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.



 

Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Saddest Music in the World, The
IFC Films

Saddest Music in the World, The reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 78 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
6.3 out of 10
based on 33 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 17 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Starring Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros, Ross McMillan, David Fox, Claude Dorge, Darcy Fehr, Erik J. Berg, and Brent Neale

It's 1933 in Winnipeg and the Great Depression is in full bloom. Beer Baroness Lady Port-Huntly (Rossellini) announces a global competition to determine the saddest music in the world, and musicians from across the globe pour into town to vie for the whopping $25,000 prize. Part musical melodrama, part tongue-in-cheek social satire, Guy Maddin's expressionistic film achieves a level of lunacy rarely seen since the Marx Brothers. (IFC Films)


GENRE(S): Drama  |  Fantasy  |  Musical  |  Romance  
WRITTEN BY: Kazuo Ishiguro
Guy Maddin
George Toles
 
DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: November 16, 2004 
Theatrical: April 30, 2004 
RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes, B/W / Color 
ORIGIN: Canada 

Film Discovery Jury Award (Best Director), 2004 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
A deliciously weirded-out picture by Guy Maddin, a deliciously weirded-out Canadian filmmaker.
Read Full Review
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
The best Canadian beer movie since "Strange Brew," and the best 1930s musical of the year, The Saddest Music in the World is the kind of exhaustingly delirious film that only Winnipeg director Guy Maddin could make.
Read Full Review
100
Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Guy Maddin has reached a new expressive plateau with The Saddest Music in the World.
Read Full Review
100
San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer
The concept is high, the humor lowbrow and the joy of experimentation evident in every frame of this wonderful picture.
Read Full Review
91
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction.
Read Full Review
90
LA Weekly John Powers
The weirdest, freest-wheeling, most obsessively inventive motion picture you'll see this year. Parts are confusing, parts are berserk, parts are exasperatingly slow. But in a world of cookie-cutter movies, Maddin's movies are like nobody else's -- funny, Romantic, as deliriously overwrought as a drug lord's wedding.
Read Full Review
90
Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis
It's all terribly tortured, often laugh-out-loud, absurdly funny and, as with all of Maddin's movies, conveyed through images that are as lush and beautifully over the top as the story's emotions.
Read Full Review
90
Newsweek David Ansen
Hilariously odd and prodigiously inventive.
Read Full Review
89
Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
The movie occasionally continues on too long with certain scenes and may strain the sensibilities of anybody not caught up in its delirious visuals and melodrama, but The Saddest Music in the World nevertheless beckons with a seductive and unforgettable melody.
Read Full Review
88
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The effect is strange and delightful; somehow the style lends quasi-credibility to a story that is entirely preposterous.
Read Full Review
88
Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
The Saddest Music In the World may not be for all tastes, but maybe it should be.
Read Full Review
88
Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
It's the stuff of soap opera, infused with a nonchalant, David Lynch-like surrealism and a nutball Canadian humor. Beer - because of the baroness, and because this is Canada - flows freely.
Read Full Review
88
Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Maddin's movies are easy, too. Point your eyes at the screen; the magic follows.
Read Full Review
88
New York Post V.A. Musetto
Meant to evoke filmmaking of a bygone era, but this time the director is more restrained visually, while making use of a more conventionally structured script than usual. And he has a real, honest-to-goodness star in Rossellini.
Read Full Review
88
New York Daily News Jami Bernard
If only there were a surefire way to describe Guy Maddin's films without scaring off viewers. The quirky Canadian is a genius who produces haunting, exquisitely droll movies that defy explanation.
Read Full Review
80
The New York Times Dana Stevens
Like most great musicals, though, this one slides, with breathtaking ease, from silliness to pathos and freely mixes exquisiteness and absurdity.
Read Full Review
80
Village Voice J. Hoberman
Because everything is funny and nothing provides a punchline, audiences may be too shell-shocked to laugh--you know you're in Maddinville when individual cackles detonate at unexpected intervals.
Read Full Review
80
Time Richard Corliss
In a movie age when there's hardly a garde, let alone an avant-garde, Maddin proves there are many languages to cinema, including the dead one of antique film. And in that language, he sings, he soars.
Read Full Review
75
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
It's a work for specialized tastes: for audiences who adore old movies, dark jokes and some high camp.
Read Full Review
70
The New Yorker Anthony Lane
I am casting no aspersions on the director when I say that The Saddest Music in the World is a work of manic depression. The mania is there in the frenzied editing, the inability to concentrate on a detail for more than a few seconds; and the depression is there in the forcible lowering of spirits. [10 May 2004, p. 107]
70
Variety David Rooney
Almost as much an art piece as a film, this playful Prohibition-era tale is visually inventive and initially amusing but, at feature length, becomes somewhat wearing in its cacophonous eccentricity.
Read Full Review
70
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Maddin films have a higher rate of invention per frame than the majority of his peers can muster.
Read Full Review
70
The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
This exercise in style and tongue-in-cheek melodrama from Canada's iconoclastic Guy Maddin will be lionized by admirers for its audacity, but will wear thin for many audience members, who will find it tedious and repetitive.
Read Full Review
70
New York Magazine Peter Rainer
Too much of this fantasy is filled out with artsy folderol, but it's a movie like no other--except, maybe, one by Guy Maddin.
Read Full Review
70
TV Guide Ken Fox
You won't see anything quite like it from any other filmmaker working today.
Read Full Review
70
Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Any film where a beer baroness's glass leg (filled with beer) shatters when a high note is struck is okay by me.
Read Full Review
70
Dallas Observer Melissa Levine
In short, it's a rich, artful film, slightly overlong but worth the time, money and energy required to get through it. Art? Definitely. Entertainment? Not so much.
Read Full Review
67
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
So stuffed with Maddin-ess that it never manages to get past the glorious surfaces. McKinney strides through his role with a knowing wink, and the sheer volume of creative imagery is as distracting as it is entertaining.
Read Full Review
63
Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
The weirdest movie of the summer. OK, the year.
Read Full Review
60
Empire Anna Smith
There's atmosphere and absurd wit, but the surreal style creates a distance from the characters that's only likely to be appreciated by fans of Maddinís self-conscious artistry.
Read Full Review
60
Film Threat Staff (Not credited)
Insanely inventive and brimming with exceptional performances, The Saddest Music in the World is as audacious as it is entertaining.
Read Full Review
60
Washington Post Desson Thomson
You're left, as with certain vivid dreams, filled with memorable images but not completely able to account for what you just experienced.
Read Full Review
40
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
The visual originality of The Saddest Music is deceiving: Narratively and spiritually, the movie is bankrupt, even though it's so packed with stuff (including a set of shapely prosthetic glass legs filled with dazzling, fizzy beer) that you can hardly bring yourself to believe that it all adds up to nothing.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 6.3 (out of 10) based on 17 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Spongeee K. gave it a9:
Unique film to say the least. Cinematography was crafty and the dark comedy and social satire were just right. I think you either get this film or you dont. Sorry for those who didnt get it...youre missing out on a classic.

Chad S. gave it a9:
"The Saddest Music in the World" just might be the most quotable comedy since "This is Spinal Tap". You won't get any spoilers from me. See this film and enjoy them firsthand. Director Guy Maddin is a visual genius, but then again, maybe he just seems so because there's nobody else replicating the thirties-era films we ignore on Turner Classic Movies to compare him with. Serbia, in a modern context, isn't a funny country to poke fun at, but this film is set in the early-thirties, so the sight of the entire world collaborating with America against a sad cello-playing Serb is hillarious because he's so deliciously pathetic in his black mourning clothes. Because the film is absurdist, it's okay to laugh at his pickled dead son's heart in a jar of self-shedded tears, and yet it still manages a level of poignancy. That same aggregate of comedy and tragedy also applies to the relationship between Lady Port-Hurtly(Isabella Rossellini) and Chester's father, whose invention is so boombastic, it would make a pimp want to cut off his own legs. "The Saddest Music in the World" will take your breath away. Maddin makes Tarrantino seem conventional.

MC Jones gave it a0:
Possibly one of the worst movies we've ever suffered through. Big yuck.

Filazafer X gave it a2:
Rarely do I quit watching a movie, but I could not make it through this one. I think it has some value, but I am not sure what it is. I felt like I was watching a student film in college. It that context it may be a masterpiece, but I just thought it sucked.

Kevin E. gave it a9:
I don't know what this was, but I couldn't take my eyes off of it. It was so thouroughly saturated with.. something.. I can't quite put my beer-filled glass finger on it.. This was my first Guy Maddin film and though it may not have been very good (how would I even know?) I can't stop thinking about it. More please!

Rico gave it an 8:
This is final proof that Guy Maddin is insane. I loved it as I do many of his other films. Mark McKinney is perfect.

Kitty M. gave it an 8:
Wonderfully shot, great satire and off beat.

Read more user comments...

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

Popular on CBS sites: Fantasy Football | Miley Cyrus | MLB | iPhone 3G | GPS | Recipes | Shwayze | NFL

About CNET Networks | Jobs | Advertise

© 2008 CNET Networks, Inc., a CBS Company. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use