Quality dressings can distract from, but never disguise, a weak body.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 2, 2022

Music scholars have challenged the film's authenticity, but they cannot dispute the magnificent image-making by director Bernard Rose.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 24, 2019

It may be a cartoon. Yet, with Beethoven's compositions crashing and storming around him, it's a cartoon that has some dark, harrowing grandeur.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 24, 2019

The results are always excessive and sometimes quite aggravating, but they're weirdly appropriate to the subject of the story, an over-the-top artiste who seemed excessive and aggravating to many of his 19th-century cronies.

| May 24, 2019

Despite Oldman's powers, this adds up to a less than immortal musical love story.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 24, 2019

Yes, this is another one of Hollywood's silly symphonies, an unintentionally amusing bit of piffle that allows mortals a privileged glimpse into the private life of a legendary composer.

| May 24, 2019

Ultimately, Beloved has all the sound and fury of Beethoven's music but none of its emotional resonance.

| May 24, 2019

Puffed up and pompous, but puny, this is a stodgy pudding of a film that moves at a snail's pace and tries unsuccessfully to accommodate wildly different performing styles from actors of various countries.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 24, 2019

Moments like these may lift Immortal Beloved high enough for even the most skeptical of purists to forgive it. Moments like these and, of course, all that glorious music.

| May 24, 2019

Immortal Beloved is pure historical hokum. Nevertheless, it is an absorbing motion picture and a heady blend of stellar performances, spectacular backdrops and crafty screenwriting.

| May 24, 2019

Da-da-da-DUMB!

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 24, 2019

It's an audacious mixture of Citizen Kane and Amadeus, with some Fantasia-like musical sequences added for good measure. Indeed, cinema has rarely given classical music such a chance to weave its spell.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 24, 2019

Immortal Beloved is a lot like the famous sketch of Beethoven's study, made shortly after he died, showing a piano strewn with piles of junk and papers. It's a mess, but you know there has to be examples of Beethoven's genius in there somewhere.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 24, 2019

For all the story's illicit passion, creative reveries, detective-like investigation and twist ending, Immortal Beloved is episodically slow and surprisingly flat.

| May 24, 2019

A turgid affair with a palette that recalls used Ace bandages.

| May 24, 2019

There is an image in Immortal Beloved as evocative as any I can remember -- as complete as the sled in Citizen Kane, or the shadowy doorway in The Third Man.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 24, 2019

Kitsch, yes, but weirdly transporting. And the score is wonderful.

| May 23, 2019

For all the movie's faults, however, Rose does show now and then that he can create an inspired marriage of image and music.

| Nov 16, 2014

As biography, Immortal Beloved is trashy and fraudulent, yet as an impressionistic riff on Beethoven's temperament, his spirit, it exerts an irresistible pull.

| Original Score: B | Sep 7, 2011

Occasionaly the hand of Hollywood crassness is reared, but there are moments of shrewd storytelling and some fine performances.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 4, 2009