Metacritic reviews

Like a grand opera, Bel Canto weaves many stories into one sweeping epic.

Swelling with humanity and romance like the crescendo of an aria, “Bel Canto” is a moving meditation on the power of love, music and proximity.

Director Paul Weitz is mostly known for lighter, more observational stories like "About a Boy" and "Mozart in the Jungle," and the strongest moments in Bel Canto are the small ones.

The film benefits from the fine cast and from many sharp and poignant moments. It's an impressive achievement technically as well.

The most serious flaw, and one that will irk a lot of Bel Canto enthusiasts, is the too-obvious lip-syncing of Ms. Moore to Ms. Fleming’s glorious singing. They simply don’t match up, and the music takes place at points in the film when viewers really don’t want to be thrown off. But thrown off they will be.

The film—Weitz’s first since 2015’s indie Grandma—feels a little cheap and shortchanged.

A movie that, for all its operatic allusions and actorly expertise, feels dismayingly passionless.

Between its minimal setup and frantic denouement, the middle stretch of this pleasingly multilingual movie sags shapelessly, as the hostages and even their captors gradually bond across cultural and linguistic barriers, with music — of course — as the language that binds them.

The film’s failure to modulate its tone, its intensity and its messaging makes it a dreary, one-note production.

The narrative staggers on, enlivened only by the hovering threat of kitsch and the musical dubbing. Moore, like an upmarket version of Lina Lamont, in “Singin’ in the Rain,” lip-synchs convincingly to the sound of Renée Fleming. But not quite convincingly enough.