Amadeus

The subject of artistic creation is typically handled badly in the movies... [Amadeus] treats the subject of creativity in a fresh way.

What has happened in the long-awaited, much-acclaimed Miloš Forman film, with its script by Shaffer, is that the popularization has gone so broad and so far afield of its elevated subject as to make that subject seem ridiculous.

This is Mozart as an eighteenth-century Bruce Springsteen, and yet (here is the genius of the movie) there is nothing cheap or unworthy about the approach.

Some of this exuberant, large-scale movie is charming and inventive, and some of it is pitifully trashy... The last third of Amadeus is a disaster.

Amadeus on the Broadway stage was a dazzling feat of dramaturgy. Miloš Forman has fashioned it into a stunning motion picture.

Mr. Forman, who created a highly original film out of the virtually formless stage production of Hair, has preserved the fascinating heart of Mr. Shaffer's play, and made it available to millions who might never enter a legitimate theater. Well done.

The virtues of Amadeus are so many, the achievements so splendid, that not much more is required of a reviewer than a listing of what is available for the price of admission.

Salieri is the role of a lifetime, a career-maker, and Abraham knows it. He caresses his performance, a bleeding, awestruck confessional, and brings the movie a tender, resonant kind of unity.

Peter Shaffer's Amadeus is scrumptiously beautiful, sizzlingly alive and bristling with social comedy. His screenplay contains the most piercing account of deadly envy since Othello, and is a heartbreaking account of a good man's fall from grace.

Abraham and Hulce make these men absolutely real; even powdered wigs and extravagant clothes cannot conceal the timeless emotions being played out.

This Amadeus is a 10-tiered wedding cake here, a feast, all right... But, when all is said and sung, the movie leaves one with the feeling of having overindulged on Viennese pastry rather than having sipped rare artistic wine.

Hulce, like the movie, may not be quite ideal, but that should not scare anyone away. There is enough enchantment in this big, generous, flawed movie for most everybody.

The music is the movie's saving grace. The movie may be shrill and overbearing but, as a celebration of some of the most glorious music ever written, it contains moments of pure rapture.

Shaffer does not pretend that this is a biography of Mozart; he calls it a "fantasia on fact," and taken in that frank vein, it is bewitching.

Hulce delivers a first-rate Mozart -- complete with the hyena laugh, clumsy gait and bathroom humor which historians assure us were accompaniments to the composer's artistic gifts.

Amadeus, Peter Shaffer's award-winning play, stood [Mozart's] image on its ear, infuriating Mozart-lovers on two continents, and Miloš Forman's splendid film adaptation... should spread the word even more widely.

The surprise of Amadeus is that although it chronicles the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and contains selections from his work, much of the movie is gloriously plebeian. The film is a passionate triumph; its spirit is both lowdown and transcendent.

Amadeus is long and slow, but it also is ornate and well-polished. It's just that where there was once a theme -- a mediocre man's rage at the gifts bestowed capriciously on another -- there is now merely a story.

What sets Amadeus apart from previous film biographies of composers is the skill with which music is integrated into the plot... For the music lover, the film is a feast.

The filmed Amadeus, despite Mozart on the soundtrack and the visual glories of Prague, is a shambles in terms of style and form.