Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

gracegorman Almost from the very beginning I wondered what on earth possessed Dustin Hoffman to become involved with this turkey. Most of the time he seemed bewildered. There was nothing in the script to explain his character's change from horrible to kindly. The script was generally awful. From a music teaching point of view it was cringeworthy. I watched it to the end for the music, but even then I wished some of the pieces were performed complete instead of cut off in the middle. That's 1 hr 45 mins of my life I won't get back.

SnoopyStyle Stet Tate is tough and living with his struggling single mom. His teacher tries to get him to audition for Carvelle (Dustin Hoffman) but he takes off only to find his mother had died. His biological father Gerard Owens (Josh Lucas) would rather keep him a secret from his family. Gerard puts him in the boarding school National Boychoir Academy run by the headmistress (Kathy Bates) and choir master Carvelle. Drake (Eddie Izzard) is infuriated by the lowering of entrance standards. However, Stet's natural singing talents and drive put him in the touring group. Soon, he's in conflict with Devon, the star of the group.Hoffman takes a similar tack as Whiplash but ends up being more like Mr. Holland. The young lead shows some capabilities but it may be asking too much. It's also may be asking too much to make choir singing compelling. It does a relatively good job to make this particular competitive world interesting but choir singing is not exactly toe tapping. Overall, it works up to a point.

hawked-off The music in this film is almost all modified, some might say butchered, to fit the needs of the editing and pacing. The modified versions, however, are beautifully sung. So much for the purists among us. Since this problem is well covered by other reviewers here, let me move on.The DVD extras reveal that in the minds of the filmmakers - director, actors, et al. - a central "message" of the movie is the too-familiar cliché of films pointed at children, that one can achieve anything with enough determination, hard work, and perseverance. To make that premise work, our hero, Stet (Garrett Wareing) must struggle with failure, hopelessness, rejection and conflict -- which he does -- and must overcome it using tools he discovers inside himself -- which he also does. What he does *not* do - or rather, what the script does not allow him to do - is give us a clue about where the miracle of his serial transformations comes from. We are left with a roller-coaster ride in which at takeoff he is troubled and seemingly alone, and at the end he is triumphant. Along the way, all we see are the peaks and valleys, with no view of the tracks he's riding on, the weather conditions, or even his real reason for taking the ride in the first place. I realize that to solve this problem, you might need the cinematic equivalent of Wagner's Ring (a 21-hour opera), so maybe it's too much to ask. It could also be solved by having a hero who has dreamed of joining a boychoir and prepared himself for years, whose difficulty is only the fact that he hasn't had the chance until opportunity unexpectedly knocks. That way we'd already know why (and how) he is able to overcome the obstacles that the rigorous choir standards put in his way.I cannot leave this review without a serious condemnation of this film's injustice to Händel's Messiah, specifically his chorus, Hallelujah (Part the Second, No.44 in most editions). Other reviews have rightly criticised this mistreatment as unworthy of a serious film about a world class boychoir. (I might add that I am astonished that the American Boychoir even agreed to record it in the first place.) It would have been unconscionable enough, had the filmmakers merely added the descant with the sycophantic high-D to the "arrangement" as it appeared in the film. But they went even further, and inserted a conversation into the script in which Drake (poor, clueless, brilliant Eddie Izzard who should have been able to depend on the scriptwriters for historical accuracy) proposes that they "one-up" the Vienna Boys Choir by writing a descant - "we write a new solo part; they were all doing it back in those days; keep it in the same key, and hit a high D". At first blush he's right - descants were commonplace, and are still being written today - but for hymns and folk songs, not fully-composed pieces, published in authorised editions, such as Messiah. I would surrender my entire reputation - undergraduate music degree, sixteen years of professional (i.e., paid) choral singing, and a thorough familiarity with Messiah performance practice going back to 1960, when I was fourteen - if anyone can document even a single instance of a solo descant being associated with Hallelujah in any creditable edition or performance. A descant hovering over Hallelujah would be rather like a beautiful sunset painted over the countryside behind the Mona Lisa. Sunsets are beautiful crowd-pleasers, but for over 500 years, the Mona Lisa as originally portrayed has been quite enough for viewers to marvel at. So with Hallelujah: pleasing crowds quite adequately, thank you, since 1741. The worst result, of course, is that this ill-advised detour from history and musicality may well be viewed by some young musician who will naïvely regard it as truth, since it was presented in such a realistic setting. Inexcusable only begins to describe it.

velijn But it isn't, not in this movie. Whatever the reviewers thought about the settings, the actors, it will always be a personal opinion, which is fine by me. No matter that almost every adult character phones in his or her part, or that the script is packed with the usual clichés - it's "Oliver" all over again, and Garett Wareing even looks like Mark Lester - if the main ingredient is good we'll sit through the rest. But it isn't good, not by a long note. It is the music itself. And its part in the movie and with the reviewers. Were there truly "angelic voices" to hear, as one reviewer noted? Did we hear the same "Hallelujah", with the same godawful "additions"? And what about the D-high nonsense, when C-6 is the highest in all (boy) soprano scores? Never mind the improbable settings; it is truly a miracle that that our boy hero succeeds in learning all the intricate notations and harmonies in a jiffy where most choristers need years of practice. We may forgive August Rush (from the movie of that name) to spring up from street urchin to master composer and conductor in less time than it takes to turn a page in the score or script, but that movie was set up as a fairy tale, so we don't mind that very much. But this movie did try to put in a bit of reality of a chorister-to-be, of a choir school, of childish competition (by the adults), of the art of learning music, of singing. The two best scenes in it are just glimpses of what have could have been. It's at the beginning, when (in an all too brief shot) the boys learn about the intricacies of scales and harmonies in class, and the moment when Hoffman explains the majestic beauty of Tallis' "Spem in alium", literally surrounded by the glory of that music. But these grace notes are held not long enough to justify the butchering of Händel's Hallelujah, including the "cute" boy solo. What is the matter? Can't we just enjoy music, choral music, on its own? Must we disnify every work of art to make it palatable for the greatest possible range of spectators? Must we go to yet another stale variation of the "from rags to riches" syndrome? Of childish pranks that range every false note on the scale of probability? The choir school tradition in the US maybe somewhat lacking in tradition (it's hard to come up against a thousand year old history of British cathedral choirs), but not in talent, witnessing the many brilliant choir performances all over the country. But not in this movie. It will be a fine Christmas tearjerker, and Garrett Wareing is stealing almost all the scenes, and justly so. But the film is certainly not the high note we've come to expect from the maker of "The Red Violin" or "Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould".If you're genuinely interested in the true history of chorister schools, try to get you hand on DVD documentaries over this great tradition - the Salisbury Cathedral Choir and King's College Choir come to mind. If you want a musical tearjerker, try "August Rush", an improbable story but a true glimpse in what music can do to you, or "Shine". If none of all that matters, well go ahead and watch "Boychoir". You've been warned.