El Cantante Critic Reviews

A star isn't born in El Cantante as much as it's reconfirmed. She's still here, and she's still got it.Read the full review

The music is the uncontested highlight of El Cantante.Read the full review

Ideally, it would give you a sense of an entire people knocking the planet off its axis with a shake of their hips. If only El Cantante were that movie. Instead, it's a curiously sludgy cross between a Doomed Star biopic and a J. Lo vanity project.Read the full review

It may be best to approach El Cantante less as a movie than as a two-hour promotional video for a must-have soundtrack album.Read the full review

If you're a fan of Hector Lavoe and Latin music, or Lopez and Anthony, you'll want to see El Cantante for what's good in it. Otherwise, you may be disappointed. The director (Leon Ichaso) and his co-writers haven't licked a crucial question: Why do we need to see this movie and not just listen to the music?Read the full review

Anthony, with his famished thousand-yard stare, turns in a delicate -- perhaps too delicate -- performance more informed by the shadow of Lavoe's death than the spark of his art. And his shrill domestic scenes with Lopez feel small and squalid, as we wait restlessly for the band to play us out.Read the full review

Anthony delivers a respectable performance, but his character never comes into sharp focus. Consequently, Lavoe emerges as a supporting character in his own story.Read the full review

Unfortunately, the music is as irresistible as the tired story of a musician succumbing to substance abuse is resistible.Read the full review

A virtual template of every imaginable cliche of the musical biopic, picture suffers from a lack of narrative and character focusRead the full review