Music Within.

"A bad movie with a good heart, Music Within is a biography of Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston), a debating champion who suffered severe hearing damage in Vietnam, then reinvented himself as an activist for the handicapped," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times.

"Pimentel's story of perseverance is a worthy and inspiring one, but on-screen it never comes together as a fully actualized dramatic narrative, despite the presence of strong performances by Ron Livingston, Michael Sheen, Melissa George and Yul Vázquez," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

"Sheen is often the saving grace of Music Within, thanks to an aggressively profane wit that gives an otherwise tapioca-bland story a little edge," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

For Robert Wilonsky, writing in the Voice, "a little earnestness goes a long way, and Music Within has a little too much of it."

At indieWIRE, Michael Joshua Rowin concurs: "[T]erribly earnest and mostly forgettable."

Steven Sawalich's "TV movie-grade direction isn't up to the task of enlivening material that eventually settles into a predictable, torpid narrative structure," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

Posted by dwhudson at October 26, 2007 8:37 AM