Copying Beethoven Critic Reviews

Topped with that messy salt-and-pepper wig that frames and obscures his scowling, searching face, [Harris] invests Beethoven with a violent turbulence that sometimes floods the room but mostly stays coiled inside, where it seethes.Read the full review

The movie is completely beguiling, and it delivers joy, the beautiful spark of the gods.Read the full review

Like an old college wrestler, Harris saunters through this toasty little piece of biographical fiction in love with the part's fixins'.Read the full review

This is one of those middle-of-the-road art pictures that will impress some music lovers and attract a small audience, but won't really excite anyone. Copying Beethoven does not do for its title composer what Amadeus did for Mozart, and that's a shame.Read the full review

Shot by Ashley Rowe to look like a cross between a Vermeer retrospective and a music video, Copying Beethoven is silly and misguided, if reasonably entertaining for its charming lack of self-awareness, its weakness for lines like "Loneliness is my religion!" and its transcendently beautiful music.Read the full review

Harris' impressive channeling of Ludwig is diluted by the decision of screenwriters Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson to put the copyist front and center, possibly to distinguish their feature from "Immortal Beloved."Read the full review

Aspires to the sublime, but it stalls at the merely ridiculous.Read the full review

Helmer Agnieszka Holland's Copying Beethoven joins 1994's "Immortal Beloved" in the ranks of mediocre dramatic interpretations of Beethoven's biography.Read the full review

The picture never successfully comes off the written page.Read the full review