New Times (L.A.) by Bill Gallo
Moviegoers might have preferred a little more care with the characters. As it is, Alma comes off not as a courageous trailblazer but as an indiscriminate adventuress.
United Kingdom, Germany, Austria · 2001
Rated R · 1h 39m
Director Bruce Beresford
Starring Sarah Wynter, Jonathan Pryce, Vincent Perez, Simon Verhoeven
Genre Romance, Drama, Music
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A biopic of Alma Mahler, the wife of composer Gustav Mahler (as well as Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel), and the mistress of Oskar Kokoschka.
New Times (L.A.) by Bill Gallo
Moviegoers might have preferred a little more care with the characters. As it is, Alma comes off not as a courageous trailblazer but as an indiscriminate adventuress.
She is known as one of the great muses, yet director Bruce Beresford, Wynter and screenwriter Marilyn Levy are never clear if this is by design or chance.
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
For all the talk of artistic and amorous passion, the film is trapped in snobbish inertia; its idea of period drama amounts to a kind of highbrow name- dropping.
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
There's great music and lovely settings, but the filmmakers have done little more with their subject than reiterate the Britannica's description of her.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
Ms. Wynter's performance is only one of many failings in a heavily accented costume drama that Bruce Beresford has directed turgidly from Marilyn Levy's amateurish script.
Chicago Reader by Lisa Alspector
Director Bruce Beresford -- not intending to be funny but succeeding wildly.
Was Alma a masochist? Repressed? Neurotic? A pre-feminist? Don't look for insight here.
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
It's a movie of elegant surfaces, great background music (by both the Mahlers), gossipy underpinnings and pretensions to romantic grandeur.
Portland Oregonian by Shawn Levy
The stifling piety of this film -- which regards anything old and vaguely arty as next to sacred -- needs some serious airing out.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold
A rather dull movie.
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