loved the long shots .. and i realy liked the acting ( am only talkin abt carey here) bradley seemed so desperate for that Oscar imo .. a movie to forget even tho am a fan of biographies

A really boring, surface level exploration of one of the more interesting musical figures of the 20th century. It makes the classic biopic mistake of retelling the subject’s life through bullet points instead of providing a unique artistic perspective or insight. The writing is so flat and just doesn’t seem to get at the heart of anything that could be memorable, which is strange because there’s potentially so much to work with. I’d welcome a movie that gave us a look into Bernstein’s artistic process/contributions or outspoken, opinionated mind, but so much of this feels like a calculated vanity project for Bradley Cooper. Carey Mulligan is the only one who completely disappears into her role in a way that feels authentic, because the other performers are a little too eager to ham it up for Academy Awards voters. You can tell Cooper did a lot of research for his role, but there’s something about his performance that feels phony and too studied. Thankfully he does a better job in the director’s chair, because in terms of visuals, editing and staging this is an improvement over _A Star is Born_. The score is often pompous and overblown (not counting the conducting scenes, of course), but I’ll give him a pass on that one because we’re dealing with a classical composer here. He even occasionally flirts with subjective abstractions (e.g. the scenes that refer back to the silent film era), however in the grander scheme of things those moments feel isolated and disconnected from the rest of the film. It’s strange how you can always feel his adventurous spirit behind the camera, but the movie as a whole never stops feeling like hollow Oscar bait. Compared to a movie like _Tár_ there’s a strong argument to be made how writing fiction can loosen the creative restraint for a writer. Because of that I honestly don’t get why there’s still such a strong emphasis on the biopic in awards circles, and no movie from 2023 exemplifies that better than _Maestro_. 4/10

Wow...Everybody is wrong about this one. Disliked by many in my mutuals, I kept putting this one off but I am just so impressed. Bradley Cooper absolutely nails it. This shit so good that it made me grab my notepad and I ended up doing two pages of scribbles about how the film's portrayal of a man's ego made me view life. This feels like a child of Scorsese which makes the fact Marty co-produced this even cooler. I feel sorry for people who genuinely think this is Oscar-bait. Bradley, please stay in the director's chair. You are a force.

They should've called this film "Bye, Felicia" because it was more about Bernstein's wife Felicia Montealegre than it was about the conductor / composer himself. Director Bradley Cooper and cinematographer Matthew Libatique did a fine job with the visual aspect of the film, but that didn't keep the story from dragging. After seeing Ferrari yesterday, this is the second film in as many days (and, with Napoleon, the third in a month) where the biopic I was hoping for is relegated to info dumps and the entire film is spent dissecting a man's penis and where he puts it. What did Bernstein accomplish musically in his life? I still have no idea but I now know he was bisexual and smoked a lot. Maybe Bradley Cooper was so distracted making this biopic about a closeted celebrity that it became a passion project and he lost sight of what was important to the rest of us?

It’s easy for me to forget sometimes that movies are more than just a hunt for the biggest dopamine hit, sometimes film is just art, and it doesn’t need to be anything else. I’m not necessarily raving about Maestro the way the media seems to be, but was it good? Yes, absolutely. It is very simple in how profoundly _human_ it is, and that's lovely. My favorite thing about Maestro was how well Carey and Bradley portrayed the playfulness between Felicia and Leonard. Can't say I know if that is an accurate portrayal but it was certainly enjoyable to watch. It gave the relationship a sense of emotional equality that you don't necessarily expect between a man and a woman in the 40s/50s. They clearly worked well together.