Critic Reviews

This is a complex and sophisticated picture, the kind of grown-up love story we see all too rarely these days, especially when it comes to starry, big-ticket moviemaking. It’s entertaining and robust and forthright; it’s also tremendously sad, not necessarily in a bring-your-hanky way, but in a deeper, more truthful way.

Maestro can’t help but be dominated by the grandeur of Bernstein’s passion, his outsize flaws, and the tightrope he walked between the need to find the meaning of beauty and the desire to stay fancy free. Yet Cooper and Mulligan make the movie a duet to remember.

Not everything in it lands cleanly, but even its misses excite, and its direct hits are knockouts.

Maestro is a refreshing subversion of the classic biopic.

Maestro exposes a truth about marriage that I always knew but could never quite articulate: To be truly known and understood can actually be scary.

Maestro is the movie of the year. Amendment: not to slight the amazing Oppenheimer, make that one of the two best films of the year. But Bradley Cooper’s warts-and-all biopic about volatile conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein has more passion, tenderness and heartbreaking resonance—and it’s a lot more fun.

It's a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center. Bravi.

We see the work, the figurative (and sometimes literal) sweat that went into crafting these characters. It’s capital-M Movie Acting, and I couldn’t love it more. It moved me.

Amplifying its force with thrilling use of the subject’s music, this is a layered examination of a relationship that might be grossly over-simplified today as that of a closeted gay man and his “beard.” But Cooper and co-screenwriter Josh Singer dig deeper to depict a unique union, fraught with conflicts yet unbreakable — even when it’s broken.

Maestro is every bit Felicia’s story as it is Bernstein’s, and all the better for it. Through her, we see how convivial, how magnetic, how cold he could be.