…the gallery of bizarre characters involved in the competition make Maddin’s film compulsive viewing…

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 24, 2023

...even Guy Maddin, Canada's homegrown David Lynch, stumbled with his gorgeous but inconsequential comedy, The Saddest Music In The World.

| Mar 16, 2020

Hilariously odd and prodigiously inventive, it springs from the eccentric mind of Guy Maddin, whose delirious visions have earned this singular Canadian filmmaker an international cult following.

| Mar 13, 2018

The film's expressionist style and lighting design provide it with an immaculate richness of visual textures.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 10, 2009

Here is magic-realism filtered through an oddball sensibility, chilled in the snowdrifts of Winnipeg and bottled in amber-hued frames of celluloid.

Full Review | Jul 2, 2007

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Crammed with cinephilic allusion and rendered in an obsessive "authentic" period style...

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jan 29, 2005

The finest portrayal of a double-amputee beer baroness outfitted with glass-encased, beer-filled legs that I could imagine.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 26, 2005

One of those metaphoric weird-out flicks that takes mors pride in shocking than telling an interesting tale.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 17, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2004

When a director's "primitive" style is as developed as Maddin's, your aesthetic response can seem like all the emotion you need, his thrill your thrill.

| Nov 19, 2004

Requires an acquired taste for such inspired but unwieldy madness.

| Original Score: B- | Nov 17, 2004

A Guy Maddin film is so visually inventive, so full of rich detail, and so prismatic in appearance that attempting to describe it is like trying to explain the color blue.

| Nov 16, 2004

Guy Maddin's snow globe cinema, hermetically sealed in ghostly adoration of silent cinema, is well matched to this darkly comic fable.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 4, 2004

Vital and delirious, The Saddest Music in the World hurtles along on twin tracks of vaudevillian humor and gleeful bad taste.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 12, 2004

...a little bit like what Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle might have been without the illusions of grandeur or pretentious aftertaste.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 30, 2004

| Original Score: B | Aug 7, 2004

Full Review | Aug 1, 2004

More than a modern copy of early cinema style, Saddest Music revitalizes melodrama as a mode of contemporary storytelling.

| Jul 22, 2004

Chances are that those who haven't bolted for the door after the first 15 minutes will love it; others could be driven to drink.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 16, 2004