Amadeus is one of the greatest film portraits of an artist for capturing the essence of their work.

| Feb 23, 2025

Decorated with a powdered-sugar sweetness and creamy lavishness unseen since the days of Josef von Sternberg, and performed by an eager to please, rootin'-tootin' American cast that would be comfortable in Oklahoma!, Amadeus is junk food par excellence.

| Aug 8, 2022

The subject of artistic creation is typically handled badly in the movies... [Amadeus] treats the subject of creativity in a fresh way.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 11, 2022

This is Mozart as an eighteenth-century Bruce Springsteen, and yet (here is the genius of the movie) there is nothing cheap or unworthy about the approach.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 11, 2022

Mr. Forman, who created a highly original film out of the virtually formless stage production of Hair, has preserved the fascinating heart of Mr. Shaffer's play, and made it available to millions who might never enter a legitimate theater. Well done.

| Jul 11, 2022

Some of this exuberant, large-scale movie is charming and inventive, and some of it is pitifully trashy... The last third of Amadeus is a disaster.

| Jul 11, 2022

Amadeus is not a film to be subjected to quibbling. Its beauty, energy and imaginative authority overwhelm everything except the objections of pedants.

| Jul 11, 2022

What has happened in the long-awaited, much-acclaimed Miloš Forman film, with its script by Shaffer, is that the popularization has gone so broad and so far afield of its elevated subject as to make that subject seem ridiculous.

| Jul 11, 2022

Peter Shaffer's Amadeus is scrumptiously beautiful, sizzlingly alive and bristling with social comedy. His screenplay contains the most piercing account of deadly envy since Othello, and is a heartbreaking account of a good man's fall from grace.

| Jul 11, 2022

Amadeus on the Broadway stage was a dazzling feat of dramaturgy. Miloš Forman has fashioned it into a stunning motion picture.

| Jul 11, 2022

The filmed Amadeus, despite Mozart on the soundtrack and the visual glories of Prague, is a shambles in terms of style and form.

| Jul 11, 2022

Abraham and Hulce make these men absolutely real; even powdered wigs and extravagant clothes cannot conceal the timeless emotions being played out.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 11, 2022

What sets Amadeus apart from previous film biographies of composers is the skill with which music is integrated into the plot... For the music lover, the film is a feast.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 11, 2022

Hulce delivers a first-rate Mozart -- complete with the hyena laugh, clumsy gait and bathroom humor which historians assure us were accompaniments to the composer's artistic gifts.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 11, 2022

Miloš Forman’s direction has blended pictures and sound into a ravishing feast for the senses. Shaffer’s invented story inevitably cowers beneath such a canopy of delight.

| Jul 11, 2022

Shaffer does not pretend that this is a biography of Mozart; he calls it a "fantasia on fact," and taken in that frank vein, it is bewitching.

| Jul 11, 2022

Amadeus, Peter Shaffer's award-winning play, stood [Mozart's] image on its ear, infuriating Mozart-lovers on two continents, and Miloš Forman's splendid film adaptation... should spread the word even more widely.

| Jul 11, 2022

This Amadeus is a 10-tiered wedding cake here, a feast, all right... But, when all is said and sung, the movie leaves one with the feeling of having overindulged on Viennese pastry rather than having sipped rare artistic wine.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 11, 2022

Hulce, like the movie, may not be quite ideal, but that should not scare anyone away. There is enough enchantment in this big, generous, flawed movie for most everybody.

| Jul 11, 2022

The music is the movie's saving grace. The movie may be shrill and overbearing but, as a celebration of some of the most glorious music ever written, it contains moments of pure rapture.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 11, 2022