Maestro Review: Sumptuous!

I was looking forward to Maestro for years, cause I loved A Star is Born, and I couldn’t wait to see what Bradley Cooper would do next solely as a director. And let me say, this movie was well worth the wait, and I loved nearly everything about this.

The two lead performances in Maestro are some of this year’s best. Bradley Cooper is as excellent as you’d expect him to be. He loses himself in the role and is caked in the make-up. You see his physical and emotional transformation as the film progresses, and it’s heart-breaking and impossible to look away from.

Carey Mulligan surprised me and blew me away with her performance. I knew she was a great actress, but I had no idea she was capable of the complexity of this character. She stole the movie and It’s so upsetting watching this seemingly helpless woman lose her husband and realize there is nothing they can do.

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What Cooper crafts with this film is exquisite. It has some of the best cinematography all year as Matthew Libatique continues to prove his excellence. The framing of every sequence was genius, it was magnificent to see these camera movements, giving the film a sense of wonder and life, paired excellently with the soaring music of Leonard Bernstein. Cooper knows how to excellent capture the feelings of sight and sound and how it can move audiences.

The story is fairly simple, and yet as it unfolds piece by piece you find yourself more engrossed in this relationship and the clear turmoil with no solution in sight. I’ve seen a lot of chatter about the LGBTQ themes in here and how they’re treated pretty poorly, and I can see where they’re coming from. The movie doesn’t handle Bernstein’s affairs with the most sensitivity, however it was never something that fully took me out of the experience.

It also clearly had to trim some of the edges off of the story, it feels like we were missing more of the family dynamic. However, I still found Maestro on Netflix to be sumptuous. It has some incredibly directed sequences that should be talked about as some of the best of the year with great talent in front and behind the camera. It’s everything I wanted it to be.

‘Maestro’ Rating – 4/5

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