Speaking in Strings

An extraordinarily intimate, deeply affecting and revelatory documentary on how pain and passion can come together in a creative artist.

If it doesn't shed much light on the violinist's personal life, it certainly conveys how personally she relates to her work.

The movie isn't bad, only scattered and incomplete.

The less you know about the world of classical music and, specifically, about one of its more flamboyant denizens, the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the less the offense of Speaking in Strings.

What mystifies, too, is the complete absence of information about Salerno-Sonnenberg's private life.

A clumsy labor of love with unforgivable lapses...key footage is missing, and it fails to show why Salerno-Sonnenberg's controversial interpretations are so original and valid.

Conveys little sense of a connection, as if di Florio had made it mainly because she had access to a celebrity.