The Magic Flute.

"The Magic Flute is Kenneth Branagh's third release this year after As You Like It and Sleuth, completing his most prolific directorial run since the early 1990s," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "It may well be the best of the three, but dare we ask him to get back to acting now? Plonking Mozart's phantasmagorical opera down in the trenches of the First World War is vintage Branagh - daring but silly."

"The horrors of Flanders provide a strange but satisfying glue," counters Charlotte O'Sullivan in the Evening Standard. "For the first time ever, the plot made sense to me."

Updated through 12/1.

"Despite the talent involved - Branagh is joined by Stephen Fry, who has written a new libretto - and the ambitious staging, this flute blows all right, but it's short on the magic," writes Wendy Ide in the London Times.

"It may not be pushing the envelope, exactly, and it perhaps won't find favour with purists," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "But it seemed to me that this Magic Flute is offered to the moviegoer in a generous, uncynical spirit, and what a refreshing change it makes to the relentless samey diet of dumbed-down formulae and charmless schlock often to be found sloshing about the cinema."

Earlier: Reviews from Venice 06.

Update, 12/1: "Fortunately the singing is uniformly amazing," writes Sarah Manvel at cinemaattraction. "Branagh and his casting director, Sarah Playfair have picked the cream of global operatic talent (the main cast of ten come from seven different countries) to provide a stunning soundtrack."

Posted by dwhudson at November 30, 2007 7:38 AM