77
Metascore
62 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100This is a complex and sophisticated picture, the kind of grown-up love story we see all too rarely these days, especially when it comes to starry, big-ticket moviemaking. It’s entertaining and robust and forthright; it’s also tremendously sad, not necessarily in a bring-your-hanky way, but in a deeper, more truthful way.
- 100VarietyOwen GleibermanVarietyOwen GleibermanMaestro can’t help but be dominated by the grandeur of Bernstein’s passion, his outsize flaws, and the tightrope he walked between the need to find the meaning of beauty and the desire to stay fancy free. Yet Cooper and Mulligan make the movie a duet to remember.
- 90The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyThe Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyAmplifying its force with thrilling use of the subject’s music, this is a layered examination of a relationship that might be grossly over-simplified today as that of a closeted gay man and his “beard.” But Cooper and co-screenwriter Josh Singer dig deeper to depict a unique union, fraught with conflicts yet unbreakable — even when it’s broken.
- Maestro is every bit Felicia’s story as it is Bernstein’s, and all the better for it. Through her, we see how convivial, how magnetic, how cold he could be.
- 80The GuardianPeter BradshawThe GuardianPeter BradshawIn the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices which art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners
- 80The IndependentGeoffrey MacnabThe IndependentGeoffrey MacnabCooper shows us his subject’s mix of magnetism, volatility and childlike egotism but he remains a strangely elusive figure. It’s left to Mulligan’s Felicia to crack the film’s sometimes too-shiny facade and to give its story some bruising emotional depth.
- 80Total FilmJane CrowtherTotal FilmJane CrowtherAn accomplished and classy follow-up to A Star is Born then, and one that proves Cooper is more than a one-hit wonder. But as an examination of artistic temperament, sexual voracity, and the patient women who love conductors, Maestro’s thunder has been stolen to a degree by Tár.
- 75The Film VerdictAlonso DuraldeThe Film VerdictAlonso DuraldeThere are dazzling, funny, heartbreaking sequences throughout this examination of the music legend and his complicated personal life, but they are undercut by aspects that might have benefited from more attention or deeper thought.
- 67IndieWireRyan LattanzioIndieWireRyan LattanzioAs a study of how the Bernsteins’ near-three-decade marriage endured Lenny’s gayness and genius, Maestro succeeds off the chemistry between Mulligan and Cooper, but the film often looks and feels too fussed-over, almost too precisely manicured, to ever erase its own parameters as a linear biopic.