60
Insanely inventive and brimming with exceptional performances, The Saddest Music in the World is as audacious as it is entertaining.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
Almost as much an art piece as a film, this playful Prohibition-era tale is visually inventive and initially amusing but, at feature length, becomes somewhat wearing in its cacophonous eccentricity.
100
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
A deliciously weirded-out picture by Guy Maddin, a deliciously weirded-out Canadian filmmaker.
80
Because everything is funny and nothing provides a punchline, audiences may be too shell-shocked to laugh--you know you're in Maddinville when individual cackles detonate at unexpected intervals.
70
You won't see anything quite like it from any other filmmaker working today.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt
This exercise in style and tongue-in-cheek melodrama from Canada's iconoclastic Guy Maddin will be lionized by admirers for its audacity, but will wear thin for many audience members, who will find it tedious and repetitive.
91
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction.
70
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Peter Rainer
Too much of this fantasy is filled out with artsy folderol, but it's a movie like no other--except, maybe, one by Guy Maddin.
80
In a movie age when there's hardly a garde, let alone an avant-garde, Maddin proves there are many languages to cinema, including the dead one of antique film. And in that language, he sings, he soars.
70
Maddin films have a higher rate of invention per frame than the majority of his peers can muster.