Critic Reviews

The crowd-pleasing comic Euro-drama The Concert is, at its musical center, as full of ripe emotion as Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. It's also as darkly funny as a Slavic farce, a composition of sweet cacophony.

It acknowledges grief, horror, and loss, but never lets it get in the way of a big, bright laugh.

Builds beautifully from a farcical premise that requires a suspension of disbelief to a musical climax that washes away our cynicism in a wave of honest tears.

Moves from rowdy, broad comedy to shameless heart-tugging, but Romanian writer-director Radu Mihaileanu keeps this French production flowing buoyantly, skittering past all manner of improbabilities.

Manipulative, overly sentimental, sometimes ludicrous and almost completely irresistible.

Though The Concert swerves and skids, it never goes off the road, and when the moment counts, when things really make a difference, the film comes through beautifully.

For at least three-fourths of its running time, The Concert is predictable, soft-edged and unremarkable. Then the titular performance, of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, begins, and the music elicits the emotional response the rest of the film has been striving for the whole time. It's enough to almost make the whole thing worthwhile.

Fans of "Train of Life" will undoubtedly embrace the picture's similarly ragtag collection of clever, lovable misfits.

Cross the cold war nostalgia of "Good Bye, Lenin!" with the larcenous high jinks of "The Producers" and you've got the gist of this zany Russian screwball comedy.

A pleasant dramatic caper that wears out its welcome, The Concert is the houseguest who sings a little too loudly and too long for his supper, tone deaf to the line between charm and imposition.