Steineded How sad is this?

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

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

Matthew D Booth Christopher Walken gives an extraordinary performance as an aging cellist faced with a life changing illness. Very Dramatic film, with deep dialogue and thoughts. The cast works well together. How I can go from College Basketball to a Emotional Film like this shows I am very refined !! Ha Ha Go see if you like the actors. The music grows on ya Bravo............

secondtake A Late Quartet (2012)This movie has become all the more poignant after the passing of 2nd violinist (in the quarter), Philip Seymour-Hoffman. And it's already a moving look at people wanting in their esoteric way to find meaning, great beauty, and love in their lives. Isn't that all the really matters?There are a myriad of interpersonal relationships here, including between two of the players who are married (and their daughter, who has an affair with a third player). In a way, the movie feels like a Beethoven quartet made literary, with all the counterpoint and harmony, all the relationships between parts. A very smart enterprise, but also a beautiful one.The movie might sound a bit dull from the outside, especially if you aren't a fan of classic music. I can't totally respond to that fairly because I am steeped in classic music a lot, and have some knowledge of the string quartet as a form (and a revered one). Beethoven, too, takes special important, not just for being a great composer, but because his "late" quartets are thought by some (including me) to be among the few greatest, inexplicably astonishing pieces of music ever written in any culture and era. They are that rich formally, emotionally, viscerally.So little pieces of the music sneak in as the human plot elements unfold. To call this an ensemble piece plays well on the pun. The way the players play with each other, and against each other, is oddly believable even if it seems that world, the classic music world, is a bit isolated from the rest of us on a day to day basis. The performances—again a pun—by the actors are subtle and intense.If Hoffman takes my attention now, a few months after his death, and if Catherine Keener is excellent as his wife, Christopher Walken might in the long run deserve the most attention for his role as cellist of the group. Playing against type, he is a serious, aging musician who discovers he has a degenerative disease. How does a man whose career, and love of life, depends on his hands adjust to not having them respond as needed? And what happens to the quartet, the group of four musicians molded by years together? That becomes a moving, meaty essence of the movie.By the way, it is normal for string quartet performing groups to form and stay together intact for decades—sometimes forty years without change. This means they are musically in tune with each other in an almost mystical way. It also means (as the movie explores) that their personal lives are bound and interwoven. It's a fabulously esoteric, unique part of the cultural world that you have to love.This movie is a great step to understanding and feeling why.

Hitchcoc As is usual, there are a group of reviewers who have given this film a single star. This is ludicrous. It seems that it is wrong to cast actors in a movie about classical music because they have to simulate playing instruments. This is also the snobbish response to audiences who are so stupid they can enjoy the conflicts among characters who have a particular gift. They are accused of being melodramatic. That's like saying you don't like Westerns because you grew up in Dodge City and these people are pretending to be cowboys. This is a touching story that centers around the Fugue Quartet which has been together for a long time. The cellist, played by Christopher Walken, has trouble fingering the instrument, and later finds out he has onset Parkinson's disease. He is determined to perform a Beethoven string quartet one last time before calling it quits. There is another subplot, the second violinist, played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, has fallen into great tension with his wife, who happens to be the Violist. He feels alone and unappreciated. One evening he has a one night stand with a woman he has met jogging. His wife finds out and they separate for the time being. Of course, they are still forced to rehearse and prepare for the major performance. I won't get into the activities of the first violinist. Yes, there is melodrama, but built into it is a great deal of wonderful musical drama. Enjoy watching some of our best actors in a really fine movie.

Lee Eisenberg "A Late Quartet" looks at music as a metaphor for people's lives. The subject is a group of musicians: two violinists (Mark Ivanir and Philip Seymour Hoffman), a viola player (Catherine Keener) and a cellist (Christopher Walken). When the cellist finds that he is developing Parkinson's and probably won't be able to play for much longer, a series of things begin to happen which have a profound effect on the foursome.While the movie make substantive use of classical music - Beethoven, Hayden, Bach, etc. - there's also a sense of how the music effects the characters' egos. The first violinist really comes across as a jerk in some scenes. Not that the other characters are much better. Some scenes grow REALLY intense.It turns out to be a very interesting little movie. The collection of classical string quartets and suites to set the stage for what eventually must come to pass represents an insightful look at the role that music plays in our lives. Good support comes from cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey and "My Dinner with Andre" co-star Wallace Shawn (also of "The Princess Bride" and "Toy Story").We can only speculate on the direction that Hoffman's career would've taken had he not died.