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Tetro
EMAILPRINTAmerican Zoetrope Releasing
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 26 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 6 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by: Francis Ford Coppola
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Release Date:
Theatrical: June 11, 2009
Running Time: 127 minutes, Color
Origin: USA | Italy | Spain | Argentina
Language(s): English | Spanish
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Carmen Maura, Maribel Verdu, Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich, and Klaus Maria Brandauer
Tetro is Francis Ford Coppola's first original screenplay since "The Conversation." It is his most personal film yet, arising from memories and emotions from his early life, though totally fictional. It is the bittersweet story of two brothers, of family lost and found and the conflicts and secrets within a highly creative Argentine-Italian family. (American Zoetrope Releasing)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Apocalypse Now Redux Dracula Jack One from the Heart (re-release) Rumble Fish The Conversation The Godfather The Godfather: Part II The Godfather: Part III The Outsiders The Rainmaker The Rainmaker Tucker: The Man and His Dreams Youth without youth
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Calvin Wilson
Shot mostly in black and white and imbued with a romanticism that's at once nostalgic and exhilarating, Tetro sneaks up on you. What threatens to be a mere exercise in style proves to be as involving as it is inventive.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
As with "Youth Without Youth," this new movie feels like a transitional work but also an inspired one, the creation of a director who, having recently turned 70, has set off on a new adventure that requires more from his audiences than some might be willing to give. Which is itself a sign of vigorous artistic renewal.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Certainly it isn't the greatest of Coppola's pictures, or even of his independent productions, but those are pretty high standards. It has a verve and vitality that's been missing from his pictures for 25 years, and its various and visible flaws all result from too much of that verve rather than too little. I enjoyed it tremendously.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
It's the product of a great dreamer and aesthete, rather than an authentic emotional experience--a gorgeous, crystalline bauble that really catches the light.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Here is a film that, for all of its plot, depends on characters in service of their emotional turmoil. It feels good to see Coppola back in form.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Unabashedly theatrical and richly cinematic, even when it's falling apart.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
The movie is alive from beginning to end, and it's a pleasure to see at least one big-name director get out of the prison of his own reputation.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
The result is visually inventive, narratively edgy, and unlike anything else.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole
Tetro is Coppola's best film since Apocalypse Now because the filmmaker has abandoned conventional drama – what for him had become a straightjacket – indulging in a collage style that allows him to honour favourite filmmakers.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Coppola's fondness for the operatic gets the better of him as the action approaches a climax, but the movie is girded by a sense of knotty family history.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
For writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de coeur, one more from the heart.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Tetro turns out to be not one movie but, at the very least, two--a Fellini-esque (or Coppola-esque) concatenation of drama, dance and opera (with a nod to Alphonse Daudet), and a modest, appealing coming-of-age story that involves Maribel Verdú (from “Y Tu Mamá También”) as Tetro’s girlfriend.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
It has style to burn, eye-catching acting by an international cast and a story that harkens back to many literary classic with its themes of a family torn apart, brothers in conflict and a son's rivalry with a towering father figure.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Like Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola has gone from being the filmmaker of his time to becoming a make-it-up-as-you-go-along indie free-shooter.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
The increasingly crude plotting and stock dialogue are killers. All the beauty the eye can hold can't, in this case, fool the ear and brain into falling for Coppola's strained tale.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey
In Tetro, nearly every time Coppola should have clung to intimacy, he opts for excess. Especially tedious are the meta excerpts from staged productions -- overcompensation trying to masquerade as illumination. Regrettable since there is such fine work being done in the smaller moments.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
When Coppola finds creative nirvana, he frequently has trouble delivering the full goods. Tetro represents something of a middle ground in that respect.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
An inchoate mass of half-baked (and sometimes blackened) Oedipal dramaturgy. Coppola has made some of the greatest films ever made in traditional narrative mode, but whenever he goes into his indie-outsider dance, he stumbles badly.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
The more dramatic revelations and tragic inevitabilities that turn up, the harder it is not to laugh. Give credit to its maker for directing with an earnestness suggesting a pretentious 22-year-old. Having passed through the phases of Interesting Apprentice, Mad Genius, Chastened Bankrupt and Shameless Wage Slave, Coppola at 70 may be the world's oldest student filmmaker.
Read Full Review >Washington Post John Anderson
Tetro has no internal tension and should have been a comedy.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Coppola’s rejuvenated sense of career is a welcome addition to the world of filmmaking, even if the two films he’s made in the new millennium (2007’s "Youth Without Youth" and now this) are not up to his own self-set high standards.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
Despite the overwrought plot and unabashed pretension, there's something admirable about the fact that Coppola clearly made this movie for himself. But he shouldn't be surprised if few others join him in watching it.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
Alas, in Tetro he (Coppola) has made a movie in which plenty happens but nothing rings true.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Alan Y gave it a10:
Visually and dramatically spellbinding. The dramatic tension is perfectly paced, the principal actors are riveting, and I especially liked the cinematography. This is not a mass-market film, but the work of an artist.
Carole G gave it an8:
It is very hard to have a successful story based solely on revelations of what happened in the past. Somehow, magically, Coppola pulled this off with "The Conversation," in which he held us fascinated, as the puzzle of what happened slowly gets solved. With "Tetro," there is no coherent story, i.e., a story that utterly coheres. I have to ascribe this to Coppola's using material that is very personal and then trying to make it interesting to the viewer; alas, he drags in whatever he thinks will work, even though the action-enhancing parts are not all of a piece. Because there is no story to follow, we are dependent on the two main characters, but I was unable to care about either of them. All this negativity aside, the film is gorgeous to watch, in its dramatic black and white, an occasionally unexpected angle, the way the camera can make us focus on a small area as though it were the entire world, reminiscent of old Japanese films such a "Tokyo Story." I wanted to love this film. I barely liked it. The very beginning held my interest, and then for a long time the grievances were played and re-played, which I found boring, and finally there were bursts of action that took the film to a level of improbability from which it was impossible to suspend disbelief. I heard Coppola on the radio recently talking about himself--it was utterly fascinating. Great talkers and great directors are not necessarily great writers. I wish someone else had written "Tetro."
amk76 mak gave it a0:
Just want to say that i love the Dracula and Apocalypse But..... You everyone begging for FFC and don/t see that whole 15 years he shot holy crap.
Drew gave it a10:
Coppola is back! I couldn't be happier with the film. It had a great story, great acting, it was beautiful to look at, and I was captivated by it the whole time. Bravo, Mr. Coppola.
