This rousing foot-tapper from the pioneering American film-maker Luis Valdez is the definitive Eighties music biopic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 27, 2024

The film feels curiously devoid of passion and lacking in curiosity as it hits every predictable beat from start to finish.

| Oct 16, 2023

Sweet and serious, a fine little movie that accomplishes just what it sets out to do.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 10, 2021

Almost everyone in La Bamba is perfectly cast, but none more so than De Soto, who plays Ritchie and Bob's mother with the vitality and ferocity usually associated with lionesses. Equally good is Elizabeth Pena.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 10, 2021

[An] excruciatingly well-meaning, excruciatingly cliched film.

| Aug 10, 2021

The visionary stage-and-screen artist Luis Valdez restores Ritchie Valens to prominence with a knockout new film La Bamba.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 10, 2021

The result is a movie that leaves one feeling modestly entertained -- the music is irresistible --but disappointed by the writer director's emotional overkill.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 10, 2021

Valens' music, sung by Los Lobos, along with a sound track of '50s hits is one of the special pleasures of this film. So is the debut of newcomer Lou Diamond Phillips as Valens.

| Aug 9, 2021

Lou Diamond Phillips, a young A actor from Texas, shows the proper mixture of ingenuousness and intensity as Ritchie, though David Hidalgo provides Valens' voice in the songs. The track, by Los Lobos, is powerful, but the film is not.

| Aug 9, 2021

The picture is full of good songs, energy and innocence. You don't have to be a Ritchie Valens worshipper to like it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 9, 2021

Ask me if La Bamba is the film it could have been, and the answer has to be no. I wish It were otherwise.

| Aug 9, 2021

You can have a perfectly pleasant time at "La Bamba" but you come out still hungry to understand the forces that shaped [Ritchie Valens].

| Mar 24, 2020

The movie works surprisingly for reasons that have nothing to do with Valens` small list of hits. La Bamba is really just a very good family story about a pushy mother proud of one son, derisive of another.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 24, 2020

As Valens, Lou Diamond Phillips has a sweetness and sincerity that in no way diminish the toughness of his onstage persona. The role is blandly written, but Mr. Phillips gives Valens backbone.

| Mar 24, 2020

How many films can be squeezed out of this formula?

| Mar 24, 2020

Melodrama is inherently a broad genre -- one that projects inner psychological conflicts onto towering outside forces -- and in the overall thrust of his film, Valdez excels in conveying a world dominated by a gigantic, impersonal power.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 24, 2020

La Bamba has a lot going for it besides its compelling teen myth. As might have been predicted, the music is terrific.

| Mar 24, 2020

The actors are mostly appealing and Valens's 50s hits (dubbed in by Los Lobos) are given their energetic due.

| Mar 24, 2020

A perfectly respectable biopic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 24, 2020

An enjoyable if slightly innocuous biopic based on the brief life and short-lived fame of teen rock'n'roll idol Richie Valens.

| Jul 7, 2010