The Red Violin

This was long for us at 130 minutes, but I took The Red Violin to The Grandmother's and we watched it during supper. I had some of the rest of the chili, which she has inexplicably started refusing to eat, and she had (and ate some of) raisin bread cheese toast and chicken soup. But I'd better not get started on our food issues. I loved this movie. I loved the music, the way the film was structured, the cinematography.... I would watch it again any time.

trailer:

Roger Ebert says,

The film is heedlessly ambitious. In a time of timid projects and easy formulas, "The Red Violin" has the kind of sweep and vision that we identify with elegant features from decades ago

DVD Talk opens by saying,

One of the Nineties' more sweeping, elegant epics that often seems to be lost in the shuffle, director Francois Girard's The Red Violin (or Le Violon Rouge, if you prefer) is a full-blooded motion picture experience, a romantic ode to the power of art that grips you from the opening moments and does not let go. It's one of the decade's unsung classics.

Reel Views says, "The Red Violin is a beautifully composed motion picture. At times, it's a near-perfect mingling of the visual and the audio." Salon.com didn't like it, concluding that it

has marvelous cinematography, a clever structure and a beautiful score by the eminent American composer John Corigliano, but what it doesn’t have is any coherent story to tell, or any reason to exist beyond admiring its own beauty.

The top critics at Rotten Tomatoes give it 86%.