Critics reviews

This is emotionally affecting at times, but writer-director Paul Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy) adopts a prosaic approach that abandons the source novel’s lyrical persuasions—it feels much like his entertaining but ultimately uncinematic Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle.

With its complex and often glorious and moving history, opera is the right vessel for the changing social dynamics Bel Canto seeks to portray. But at times, one wonders if the film itself isn’t afraid of the true power of opera, and thus holds it at a distance.

It's so dismissive of the outside world — and the background of its guerrilla leader (Tenoch Huerta, making much of the little he’s given) — that it’s politically and ideologically barren.