| Netflix | Release Date: November 24, 2023 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
9
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Nov 28, 2023
Yes, this look back at one extraordinary, joyous, painful year in the life is a music documentary. But American Symphony is also a love story, a look at the personal toll that illness takes on everyone involved (at one point, we ride shotgun during an uncomfortably intimate therapy session), a testament to leaps of faith, and a testimony to the idea that living isn’t a passive act even in the best of times, much less the worst.
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Nov 22, 2023
A celebration of art, resilience and the mutability of the human spirit, Matthew Heineman‘s American Symphony never feels like it’s quite the documentary that its director originally intended it to be. Nor does it tell the story that featured star Jon Batiste presumably hoped for it to chronicle. But it’s all the more joyful and emotionally resonant for those deviations.
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Nov 22, 2023
For this warm and lovely film’s most natural audience, which will most likely be families struggling with illness, the documentary’s final inconclusiveness may feel like a feature, not a flaw: Music is forever, and so is chemo, in some cases. Holding those elements in balance is one way to create a symphony.
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Nov 29, 2023
American Symphony itself is at its most mundane when focused on the professional life of the rousing, youthful musical multihyphenate. And, because it builds its structure around the creation and premiere of his first symphony, much of the film bundles that mundanity into the kind of behind-the-scenes footage accompanying a concert doc.
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