Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

A deliciously weirded-out picture by Guy Maddin, a deliciously weirded-out Canadian filmmaker.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Liam Lacey

The best Canadian beer movie since "Strange Brew," and the best 1930s musical of the year, The Saddest Music in the World is the kind of exhaustingly delirious film that only Winnipeg director Guy Maddin could make.

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Guy Maddin has reached a new expressive plateau with The Saddest Music in the World.

San Francisco Chronicle by Carla Meyer

The concept is high, the humor lowbrow and the joy of experimentation evident in every frame of this wonderful picture.

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.

L.A. Weekly by John Powers

The weirdest, freest-wheeling, most obsessively inventive motion picture you'll see this year. Parts are confusing, parts are berserk, parts are exasperatingly slow. But in a world of cookie-cutter movies, Maddin's movies are like nobody else's -- funny, Romantic, as deliriously overwrought as a drug lord's wedding.

Los Angeles Times by Manohla Dargis

It's all terribly tortured, often laugh-out-loud, absurdly funny and, as with all of Maddin's movies, conveyed through images that are as lush and beautifully over the top as the story's emotions.

Newsweek by David Ansen

Hilariously odd and prodigiously inventive.

Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten

The movie occasionally continues on too long with certain scenes and may strain the sensibilities of anybody not caught up in its delirious visuals and melodrama, but The Saddest Music in the World nevertheless beckons with a seductive and unforgettable melody.

New York Post by V.A. Musetto

Meant to evoke filmmaking of a bygone era, but this time the director is more restrained visually, while making use of a more conventionally structured script than usual. And he has a real, honest-to-goodness star in Rossellini.

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

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.

Time by Richard Corliss

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.

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

You won't see anything quite like it from any other filmmaker working today.

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

Maddin films have a higher rate of invention per frame than the majority of his peers can muster.

Variety by David Rooney

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.

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.

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.

Film Threat

Insanely inventive and brimming with exceptional performances, The Saddest Music in the World is as audacious as it is entertaining.