Metacritic reviews

It's a movie of elegant surfaces, great background music (by both the Mahlers), gossipy underpinnings and pretensions to romantic grandeur.

A rather dull movie.

The stifling piety of this film -- which regards anything old and vaguely arty as next to sacred -- needs some serious airing out.

She is known as one of the great muses, yet director Bruce Beresford, Wynter and screenwriter Marilyn Levy are never clear if this is by design or chance.

There's great music and lovely settings, but the filmmakers have done little more with their subject than reiterate the Britannica's description of her.

For all the talk of artistic and amorous passion, the film is trapped in snobbish inertia; its idea of period drama amounts to a kind of highbrow name- dropping.

Was Alma a masochist? Repressed? Neurotic? A pre-feminist? Don't look for insight here.

Director Bruce Beresford -- not intending to be funny but succeeding wildly.

Ms. Wynter's performance is only one of many failings in a heavily accented costume drama that Bruce Beresford has directed turgidly from Marilyn Levy's amateurish script.

Moviegoers might have preferred a little more care with the characters. As it is, Alma comes off not as a courageous trailblazer but as an indiscriminate adventuress.