Evita
Buena Vista Pictures | Release Date: December 25, 1996 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
45
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 23 Critic Reviews
Positive:
8
Mixed:
12
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
TimeRichard Corliss
But this Evita is not just a long, complex music video; it works and breathes like a real movie, with characters worthy of our affection and deepest suspicions. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
But Parker's visuals enliven the music, and Madonna and Banderas bring it passion. By the end of the film we feel like we've had our money's worth, and we're sure Evita has. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
This brash, glitzy, energetic entertainment has the power to hold an audience enraptured, but, at the same time, there's a sense that what we're experiencing is just candy for the eyes and ears. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleOctavio Roca
Alan Parker's picture is epic, lavish and fascinating. It is not a perfect screen musical, but it is spectacular and it works. Read full review
75
TV Guide MagazineStaff(not credited)
Alan Parker's big-budget adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's surpassingly shrewd stage spectacular isn't a big fat failure. But it isn't a resounding success, either: It's an awkward hybrid, neither lavish eye candy nor credible drama. Read full review
70
Washington PostRichard Harrington
Evita is a busy movie with an often noisy soundtrack that can get tedious and monotonous (particularly in the second half), but it's just as likely to sweep one away with its musical, emotional and historical momentum. Read full review
70
VarietyTodd McCarthy
Director Alan Parker has done a dazzling job creating screen images to accompany the wall-to-wall music, resulting in a musical fresco that is much closer to a sophisticated filmed opera than to any conventional tuner. Read full review
63
USA TodayMike Clark
So fluidly visual that only a deathbed finale can flag its pace, it's the first Panavision music video to run 21/4 hours, the monotony finally sapping its staying power. [23 Dec 1996 Pg.01.D]
60
EmpireAngie Errigo
Madonna knocks herself out and deserves cheers for the emotional range and humanity with which she sings in Alan Parker's spectacular film. But whether you think the movie is great or grisly, rests in large part on your palate for Andrew Lloyd Webber's music. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter Travers
The movie is such a chore because watching actors strain to wrap their mouths around prerecorded songs for 134 minutes is irritating and, worse, alienating. Read full review
50
SalonLaura Miller
Lloyd Webber is everything loud, dumb and tiresome, and everything loud, dumb and tiresome in Evita is him. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorDavid Sterritt
The movie takes no particular stance on the controversies surrounding its heroine, seen by some as a self-serving egomaniac and others as a tireless champion of the poor. Nor can much insight be gleaned from Madonna's energetic but oddly impersonal performance. Read full review
50
The New York TimesJanet Maslin
But the film is still breathless and shrill, since Alan Parker's direction shows no signs of a moral or political compass and remains in exhausting overdrive all the time. Read full review
50
NewsweekDavid Ansen
It's gorgeous. It's epic. It's spectacular. But two hours later, it also proves to be emotionally impenetrable. Read full review
42
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Technically, Madonna's singing is beautiful -- elegant, silky, refined. Yet there's no fire, no twinkle of ambitious joy, to her performance. Her face is fixed, almost tranquilized -- a porcelain mask. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleMarjorie Baumgarten
Experiencing Evita is like watching one uninterrupted long-form music video divided only by different arias or costume changes (of which there are untold numbers). Read full review
40
SlateLouis Menand
Movie audiences today may want a little more, and the fundamental problem with the movie is that there is nothing in the story, as Rice and Lloyd Webber have designed it, to engage our feelings. Read full review
40
The A.V. ClubMaria Schneider
Its political insights are half-hearted at best, and as entertainment it fails to excite. The songs sound mostly like glam-rock relics. Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
Without real dialogue and believable connections between actors, Evita is limited in its effectiveness, and all the crying for Argentina in the world can't change that. Read full review
40
The New YorkerAnthony Lane
There are moments when music and lyrics bear only the faintest relation to each other, a tricky state of affairs in a work that is almost bereft of spoken dialogue. Read full review
30
Dallas ObserverPeter Rainer
As an actress, Madonna has to work on her vulnerability more. Read full review
25
San Francisco ExaminerBarbara Shulgasser
Unfortunately, this movie needed an attractive, irresistibly charismatic performer to give us some reason for watching. Madonna is made up to look like Eva, but this is hardly enough to carry the movie. Read full review
0
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical. Read full review
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