Critic Reviews
78
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
29(88%)
mixed
4(12%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 33 Critic Reviews
100
A deliciously weirded-out picture by Guy Maddin, a deliciously weirded-out Canadian filmmaker.
100
The best Canadian beer movie since "Strange Brew," and the best 1930s musical of the year, The Saddest Music in the World is the kind of exhaustingly delirious film that only Winnipeg director Guy Maddin could make.
100
Guy Maddin has reached a new expressive plateau with The Saddest Music in the World.
100
The concept is high, the humor lowbrow and the joy of experimentation evident in every frame of this wonderful picture.
91
Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction.
90
The weirdest, freest-wheeling, most obsessively inventive motion picture you'll see this year. Parts are confusing, parts are berserk, parts are exasperatingly slow. But in a world of cookie-cutter movies, Maddin's movies are like nobody else's -- funny, Romantic, as deliriously overwrought as a drug lord's wedding.
90
It's all terribly tortured, often laugh-out-loud, absurdly funny and, as with all of Maddin's movies, conveyed through images that are as lush and beautifully over the top as the story's emotions.
90
Hilariously odd and prodigiously inventive.
89
The movie occasionally continues on too long with certain scenes and may strain the sensibilities of anybody not caught up in its delirious visuals and melodrama, but The Saddest Music in the World nevertheless beckons with a seductive and unforgettable melody.
88
Meant to evoke filmmaking of a bygone era, but this time the director is more restrained visually, while making use of a more conventionally structured script than usual. And he has a real, honest-to-goodness star in Rossellini.
