Grand Piano

The sheer sly joy of the filmmaking that is on display here is one of the reasons I go to movies.

For all its virtuosic showboating, the film belongs as much to its screenwriter, Damien Chazelle, as it does to its director, Eugenio Mira.

Not all the right notes are hit in Grand Piano, but for an elegantly schizoid B movie, it's more B-sharp than B-flat.

A nail-biting thriller in the classic Hitchcock style.

[An] appealingly absurd thriller.

Though Mira shows skill at evoking mood and building tension despite the constrained circumstances of the premise, the narrative quickly and embarrassingly breaks down.

When people complain about movies glutting the market, this moronic “Black Swan”-meets-“Phone Booth” thriller is what they mean.

Music fans will be drooling over the beautiful music and setting, while those less interested in music will shrug it off as little more than a guilty pleasure. I however am a music fan, and enjoyed it from the first note to the pounding finale.

Heart-pumping thriller throughout. I thought it was brilliant. Now I know some will probably **** about the ending, but I personally felt it was perfect. Sometimes it's what you don't know that makes the ending of a film great.

Une sorte de remake de Phone Game mais avec un pianiste coincé dans son piano et contraint d'éviter les fausses notes. Dit comme ça, ç'a l'air con et ça l'est assez quand même... même si l'audace a parfois le don de suspendre temporairement l'incrédulité du spectateur éberlué. Mais je schématise. Le film est fort bien réalisé, sa photographie est soignée, ses plans sont judicieux, même les acteurs ne font pas tache outre-mesure et le film plutôt court sait garder un assez bon tempo. Le problème, c'est que le vernis propret vient inévitablement à craquer, car comment croire une histoire aussi abracadabrante pendant presque une heure et demi ? Définitivement grotesque, quel que soit le bout par lequel on tente de le prendre ou de le suspendre, le film fait penser à cette toile abstraite que vous venez d'acheter, cette croûte de lard con-temporain dont on ne sait plus le haut du bas. L'originalité a décidément ses limites que le manque de talent s'empresse d'ignorer. Et puis il eut fallu un vrai compositeur, un vrai beau morceau de musique classique, pas ce truc sorti d'on ne sait où ! non mais !

The core concept of Grand Piano is wonderfully fraught with tension. The notion of a concert pianist making his improbable (albeit begrudging) comeback under such enormous pressure, and then intensifying that pressure ten-fold with the threat of being killed should he play a single wrong note, is practically ****. The problem is that the conceit is so structured that screenwriter Damien Chazelle doesn’t have the storytelling acumen to keep the story plausible. The comparison to Speed is a accurate one, but it’s also a good exercise in compare-and-contrast. With Speed, the “one false move and your dead” peril is based on active movement (don’t drive the bus slower than 55 MPH), which allows for some of the great set-pieces to naturally evolve: managing that feat in traffic, and with people on the bus, and with a partially unfinished freeway (not to mention an in-motion rescue attempt). With this film, the “one false move and your dead” peril pertains to … Tom’s hands. The only thing he needs to keep moving at the right speed are his hands. Where do you naturally go from there? Chazelle and director Mira answer that question by forcing action – by spreading outward instead of tightening inward – usually to the point of ridiculousness.

A truly terrible film with a ludicrous plot and dreadful acting, most notably from John Cusack who delivers the weakest performance of his career. The script is wooden and the direction is dire.