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

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

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

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

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

Crucially, [director Rose] fails to drum up much suspense or even interest in the solution to the puzzle, poking a hole in his own balloon even before he fills it with air to try to make it fly.

| Oct 18, 2008

The film may plod and pulse in equal measure, but the ecstatic visualisation of the climactic Ode to Joy is a triumph.

| Feb 9, 2006

[Oldman] captures Beethoven as a believably brilliant figure struggling with his deafness and other demons. His performance combines bitterness and eccentricity with the deep romanticism that can be heard in the music.

| May 20, 2003

If you think this movie is going to solve the mystery of Beethoven's cryptic inscription on his last quartet, as it pretends to, you're out of your skull.

| Jun 12, 2002

It is, in the end, no more than a nice, fluffy, heavily romanticized stab at an already disputed history.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

[Gary Oldman] at first might seem an eccentric choice for Beethoven -- until you realize that only an eccentric choice would have been appropriate. Oldman presents us with a vulnerable, erratic, wigged-out Beethoven.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000