Casa Gucci

A loud, enjoyably pointless opera buffa that fictionalizes the financial and criminal shenanigans of the famous Italian design family.

It gave me everything I needed -- and then some. I wanted the film to be over-the-top, messy, silly, involving, gorgeous, stylish -- and it's all those things.

Isn't that all we really want from the movies? Brain soft, Gucci soothing, and that's all she wrote.

It's long and poorly paced and plays too loose with the facts. Oh, well! The bonkers true story that chronicles the unraveling of the Italian fashion empire is also first-class frothy and fun entertainment.

Unambitious and underwhelming.

The rest, however, is left struggling to find its footing as it oscillates between soap opera and prestige drama.

Caught between the lure of campy excess and the seeming desire to tell a more somber tale of dynastic struggle.

When Lady Gaga is on screen, this movie is very watchable and compelling. When she is gone, it is about a bunch of guys sitting around conference tables in expensive suits talking about documents.

It's mostly that big fight over that fortune, about how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If the film is remembered for anything, it's for being Exhibit A as what a great actor [Lady Gaga] is. Forget Gucci. Long live the house that Gaga built.

Like it or not, see this lavish soap opera and you'll know you've been to the movies.

You reach the end of the movie, sometimes having been entertained and more often irritated, and wonder, "What were they trying to do here?"

There's a joyful campiness to House of Gucci that is firmly established by the pop star turned movie star's performance.

This long, bouncy tale of the Italian luxury designers' fall never met a fast car it didn't slow down to capture. And it loves actors!

It's a movie blueprinted to be a hit, and if it succeeds-whether with boomers, millennials, Gaga's Little Monsters, or some sort of broad coalition-it'll sadly prove its own point about the inherent, illicit, and insubstantial allure of wretched excess.

Lady Gaga is never less than fascinating to watch and Driver, always impressive, gives one of his best performances in this bananas story of glamor, ambition, and betrayal.

Say this for "House of Gucci," it announces its basic silliness right off the bat.

I found the film so insistently campy yet painfully mirthless-its style lies somewhere between opera buffa and telenovela-that my mental state of acute anguish may have skewed my perceptions of whatever the story has to offer.

Scott goes for broke, hitting the mark more often than he misses, but when those shots go wide, they do so by a country mile.

This would have made such a better streaming series. As is, it's an overstuffed turkey.