The Paris Opera

Covering an eventful artistic season, Jean-Stéphane Bron’s The Paris Opera is a well-observed vérité portrait of a major cultural institution.

The Paris Opera feels at once sprawling and insufficiently patient.

The Paris Opera is a good representation of the struggle behind the spectacle. In movies, though, it’s sometimes best to even out those proportions — a little less absolute truth, and a little more bull.

For a documentary about one of the most prestigious opera institutions in the world, The Paris Opera has, maddeningly, very little opera.

Unfortunately, the film has nothing much to say other than that the enterprise is inherently complicated — which isn’t point enough for 111 minutes of screen time.