Source: EW.com
- type
- Movie
- release date
- 10/05/18
- performer
- Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga
- director
- Bradley Cooper
- distributor
- Warner Bros.
- mpaa
- R
The first critical reactions to Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s contemporary remake of A Star Is Born scale the peaks of Oscar buzz.
The long-gestating fourth adaptation of the classic entertainment industry romance held its world premiere screening Friday at the Oscar-positioning Venice International Film Festival, where movie critics lauded Cooper’s filmmaking hand and performative chops as an aging crooner, though Gaga’s first lead role in a Hollywood production has also drawn significant praise.
“Gaga’s serious-actress transformation for her first major film role will undoubtedly lead the conversation, and she deserves praise for her restrained, human-scale performance as a singer whose real-girl vulnerability feels miles away from the glittery meat-dress delirium of her own stage persona,” EW’s Leah Greenblatt, who also praises Cooper’s camera for its “feverish intimacy,” writes. The Playlist‘s Jessica Kiang similarly praises Gaga, though she observes “the star that is truly born here is Cooper as a director.”
In the film, Cooper — making his directorial debut on the project — plays a fading country musician named Jackson Maine, whose personal demons prompt a dramatic downward spiral after he meets and falls for a struggling singer-songwriter, Ally (Gaga). However, Jackson’s vitality — and Ally’s burgeoning imprint on the entertainment world — takes off during their courtship, though his ongoing internal battle ultimately threatens to destroy the foundation of their relationship as well as his own creative ambitions.
“That’s the soapy tragic Star Is Born concept,” writes Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman. “But what the movie does is to take this fabled melodramatic romantic seesaw and turn it into something indelibly heartfelt and revealing.
Cooper directed the movie himself, working from a script he co-wrote with Eric Roth and Will Fetters, and to say that he does a good job would be to understate his accomplishment. As a filmmaker, Bradley Cooper gets right onto the high wire, staging scenes that take their time and play out with a shaggy intimacy that’s shorn of the usual ‘beats.’ The new Star Is Born is a total emotional knockout, but it’s also a movie that gets you to believe, at every step, in the complicated rapture of the story it’s telling.”The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw, awarding the film five out of five stars, calls the film “outrageously watchable and colossally enjoyable,” going on to herald its “dilithium crystals of pure melodrama” as well as the “ingenuous openness” of the chemistry between the film’s leads. With reference to the older iterations, Time‘s Stephanie Zacharek also feels “Cooper’s version proves there’s always a way to freshen up old material” and calls the film a “terrific melodrama for the modern age. ”
In addition to starring in the film, Cooper (a four-time Oscar nominee) and Gaga (also previously nominated as a songwriter) worked together to write and record original songs (which Greenblatt calls “memorably, sturdily melodic”) for the film’s soundtrack with the latter’s frequent collaborators such as “Born This Way” producer DJ White Shadow and Joanne executive producer Mark Ronson, as well as musicians Jason Isbell, Lukas Nelson, Diane Warren, and Dave Cobb.
Though it did not bow as part of Venice’s prestigious competition lineup, A Star Is Born’s Venice screening still represents a vital step on the awards trail for a film looking to break into the Oscar conversation, as the festival has ignited the Academy Award runs of films like The Hurt Locker, Gravity, Birdman, Arrival, The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and eight others since 2007 that have…
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