Metacritic reviews

A deliciously weirded-out picture by Guy Maddin, a deliciously weirded-out Canadian filmmaker.

Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction.

In a movie age when there's hardly a garde, let alone an avant-garde, Maddin proves there are many languages to cinema, including the dead one of antique film. And in that language, he sings, he soars.

Because everything is funny and nothing provides a punchline, audiences may be too shell-shocked to laugh--you know you're in Maddinville when individual cackles detonate at unexpected intervals.

This exercise in style and tongue-in-cheek melodrama from Canada's iconoclastic Guy Maddin will be lionized by admirers for its audacity, but will wear thin for many audience members, who will find it tedious and repetitive.

Too much of this fantasy is filled out with artsy folderol, but it's a movie like no other--except, maybe, one by Guy Maddin.

Almost as much an art piece as a film, this playful Prohibition-era tale is visually inventive and initially amusing but, at feature length, becomes somewhat wearing in its cacophonous eccentricity.

Maddin films have a higher rate of invention per frame than the majority of his peers can muster.

You won't see anything quite like it from any other filmmaker working today.

Insanely inventive and brimming with exceptional performances, The Saddest Music in the World is as audacious as it is entertaining.