Critic Reviews

It’s an earnest mash note to the power of music that resists over-sentimentalizing its sacrifices, or overstating its rewards.

What makes Power Ballad a terrific film is how much we believe this story.

Power Ballad is a movie that constantly surprises you by plucking chords of hope from a heartbreaking narrative.

Carney has offered a sharp, hopeful crowdpleaser that strikes the right notes.

If you expect the best from everyone involved, prepare for disappointment. But without giving anything away, it’s fair to say Power Ballad is a mix of feel-good, then feel-bad, then mostly feel good again. That’s a recipe for a pretty good popcorn movie, even if you can’t dance to it.

Compared to his other recent work, Carney’s latest pulls back a bit on the music and leans more into the comedy side of things, yet Power Ballad maintains the heart and optimism that is brimming from all his films, and hopefully, it will get the attention it deserves.

Power Ballad isn’t just a case of a director rehashing his greatest hits — even though the most famous song from Carney’s most famous movie makes a cameo. While it begins in similar fashion to nearly all of his movies — with an unlikely collaboration sparking sonic kismet and a host of catchy tunes — it also takes those familiar tropes in some welcome new directions.

What keeps Power Ballad flowing is the juice of the dialogue, the comic humanity of the plotting and, above anything else, that charmingly ingenuous belief in pop music as something that truly matters. Good work.

Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure.

Another catchy Valentine to the transcendent properties of music, Power Ballad is perhaps a little more grounded than your average John Carney playlist. Full of native wit, warmth and generosity: play it on repeat.