TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

gill_shave I only caught the last hour of this film last night on TV. I thought that it was subtle and intelligent. Obviously one is not going to get a full uncut performance of a late Beethoven quartet in a film about the psycho dynamics of the players and their devotion to the music that they performed. However inevitably the music did take centre stage because of its profundity and without it I would not have understood so well their individual stories. This meant that for me, the background music that appeared elsewhere was a massive irritation. Would it not have been better to have no background music in a film that was about great music? I think so. In a few films (The Talented Mr Ripley comes to mind) every note has been calculated in minute detail and contributes to an extraordinary overall experience. In this film, the background music as a massive minus point for me...although I can't wait to see the film again in its entirety.

writers_reign Clearly at no stage of development did anyone involved in this movie see it as anything but art house fodder and that means that no one, especially no member of the cast, signed up for anything other than job satisfaction and if all movies were made like that we could get rid of the dreaded cgi and sequel syndrome but, inevitably, we would become bored with a surfeit of quality. So it's probably just as well that movies as sublime as this are thin on the ground. Because, make no mistake this IS a sublime movie suffering from perfect casting which equates to labour-of-love performances. O the whole I can take or leave Classical music, give me the Great American Songbook and I'm a happy bunny, Cole Porter rather than Purcell, Jerry Kern rather than Rimsky Korsakov, you get the picture. So the classical music that formed the warp and the woof of this entry was almost incidental except that it DID actually arouse my interest and enhanced what were already impeccable performances. In short I found this to be both absorbing and entertaining.

riojones23 A stellar cast do their best with what could have been an interesting exploration of the professional and emotional lives of top-class musicians. Unfortunately, cack-handed directing and writing means 'A Late Quartet' lacks subtlety and brings suspended disbelief crashing to the ground.Such suspension is necessary if, for example, we are to take Christopher Walken (doing his best to smother his trade-mark voice but admittedly adding a much needed third dimension to his character) seriously as a world class Cellist... The film failed to sell me the world of classical music and the lives of these characters. 'A Late Quartet' prefers excruciating exposition and hammy facts about Beethoven, which at times render the dialogue copy and paste from Wikipedia, to a sense of tone and genuine observation. Sautet's 'Un Coeur en Hiver', for example, admirably achieves what 'A Late Quartet' fails to do; namely inducting an audience into the exclusive world of classical music and high culture without treating them like idiots. The result is a beautiful film which allows the music and its characters to take centre stage, and I longed for 'A Late Quartet' to do the same and deliver on its potential. However, it fails to strike a consistent tone. At one point a scene involving Poots, Keener and Ivanir comes dangerously close to descending into a farce straight out of a lowest-common-denominator RomCom, in just one of many examples where the film contrived to undermine itself.Nonetheless, 'A Late Quartet' is not terrible and I was entertained. It offers flashes of sincerity and a few touching moments which I would attribute to the quality of the actors and an interesting conceit. However, I found myself laughing at it much more than I was moved by it. A film which is definitely hard to take as seriously as it wants to be taken.

zetes An okay drama that might be quite a bit less than okay if it weren't for its performances. In particular, Philip Seymour Hoffman, for which I obviously watched the film, stands out. The film involves a popular string quartet composed of Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener and, um, Mark Ivanir. I guess they ran out of money before hiring the fourth member of the cast. Actually, Ivanir, who is a popular character actor whom you've seen dozens of times, is pretty good in the film. The fifth major member of the cast is played by Imogen Poots, that young Scottish gal with the world's most amusing moniker. So Walken is the eldest member of the quartet. He was famous before the others, and gathered the three younger members years ago. Now he's starting to suffer from Parkinson's, which throws the group into turmoil. Hoffman and Keener are a married couple with a strained marriage and professional career. Poots is their daughter, who is the student of Ivanir; she also becomes his lover. The plot is nothing at all to write home about, but, as I said, the actors are all fine (with the exception of Poots, who really isn't very talented). Hoffman has a couple of killer scenes.