| Warner Bros. | Release Date: October 3, 1986 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
15
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
|
Critic Reviews
The screenplay, by Mr. Tavernier and David Rayfiel, is both rich and relaxed, with a style that perfectly matches the musicians'. Some of the talk may well be improvised, but nothing sounds improvised, but nothing sounds forced, and the film remains effortlessly idiosyncratic all the way through.
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Bertrand Tavernier's 'Round Midnight is a superlative elegy, a bluesy, melancholy movie dedicated to expatriate jazzmen Bud Powell and Lester Young. It captures the essence of their music, moving with the smokey, meandering rhythms of bebop. [03 Feb 1987, p.3D]
Gordon’s remarkable as the emotionally disarranged, psychologically disintegrating jazzman, and when the little Frenchman calls him a genius, you suddenly realize what that overused term implies: not moral worthiness or superior personhood but a giftedness beyond accounting that hardly belongs to character at all.
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It isn't much to say that "Round Midnight" is the best jazz film ever
made (there's so little competition), but it's true. Tavernier has an
impeccable feel for how the music is played and--more important--why it is
played. [24 Oct 1986, p.A]
My only quibble with the film is that the character of the Frenchman is
too precious to be believed. But that's no reason to stay away from this lesiurely but powerful story of not a man and his music, but a music and one of its men. [24 Oct 1986, p.A]
Saturated with a passion for jazz, "Round Midnight" plays upon the heart as dextrously as Gordon's huge, eloquent hands coax music from the instrument he calls Lady Sweets. [20 Oct 1986, p.78]
Tavernier seems to be enshrining his own idolatry. The music itself has none of the mysterious teeming vitality of great bebop--it's lifeless.
Round Midnight is too long and too slow. [25 Jun 1987]
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