Maestro is another masterpiece from Bradley Cooper and easily one of the best films of 2023

Director Bradley Cooper follows up A Star Is Born with another music-focused masterpiece but Carey Mulligan steals the show with the best acting of the year.

Soloists Isabel Leonard and Rosa Feola with Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.

Maestro (M)

Director: Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born)

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan.

Rating: *****

She’s never seen. He’s always heard.

In the dazzling world conjured by Maestro, we don’t just keep learning that behind every great man, there is a great ego.

We also keep hoping that behind that great ego – should there be any space left – we just might find a great woman.

The great man in Maestro is the incomparable Leonard Bernstein, a trailblazing conductor, composer and ambassador for music whose staggering body of work is the 20th century writ large in sound.

As for the great woman, her name is Felicia Montealegre.

For the best part of three decades, this exquisitely talented actor left her own rare gift for creative expression unwrapped, just so she could play the uncredited and often thankless role of Mrs Leonard Bernstein.

Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre and Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.

A fascinating, provocative, uplifting and sobering biopic, Maestro marks the second directorial venture of actor Bradley Cooper. Just like his debut feature, A Star is Born, the end result is a complete, must-see triumph.

Cooper also plays the lead role of Bernstein. Very, very well, I might add. So well, that this display might just go down as the best performance of his career. (That strange fuss made over Cooper’s acquisition of a fake nose is quickly rendered irrelevant once the movie is underway.)

However, his is not the best performance in the movie. As was the case in A Star is Born, Cooper tactfully cedes the brightest spotlight to an equally-billed co-star.

Carey Mulligan’s interpretation of the role of Felicia amounts to the finest acting of the year, by some considerable distance.

The complex fleet of emotions continually landing and taking off under Mulligan’s control as Felicia is nothing short of stunning.

So powerful is Mulligan’s impact upon the movie that Maestro has no choice but to be just as much about the marriage of the Bernsteins, as it is about the musical legacy of Leonard Bernstein.

In purely cinematic terms, Maestro is appropriately symphonic in both structure and feel.

Sequences such as those depicting Bernstein’s legendary debut as a conductor, the fateful night Felicia first meets Leonard, and an epic confrontation between the couple in their last years together all hit towering crescendos that will sweep away entire audiences.

However, the quieter grace notes so sensitively sounded out by Maestro – particularly when Felicia stops forgiving and starts resenting her husband’s bisexual inclinations – are just as resonant and moving.

An unforgettable experience that always has you looking closely and listening intently, Maestro is undoubtedly one of the best movies of 2023.

Maestro is in cinemas now and premieres on Netflix on Wednesday, December 20

SILENT NIGHT (MA15+)

***

General release

Joel Kinnaman in John Woo’s new action-thriller, Silent Night.

The set-up here is Revenge Movie 101. They killed his kid. Now they are gonna get it. So is there any reason to keep you in your seat while this old scripting chestnut is reheated? There are two, actually. The first is that Silent Night marks the welcome return of Hong Kong filmmaking legend John Woo after a lengthy absence. In his heyday, Woo could whip up a hurricane of flying limbs, smoking gun barrels and bursting blood vessels that could leave a viewer dazed for weeks. Though the veteran director has mellowed, the pure energy pulsing through Silent Night proves Woo is still a grandmaster of kinetic cinema.

Joel Kinnaman in Silent Night. The old scripting chestnut of revenge may have been reheated, but there are still reasons to watch this action-thriller.

The second reason to catch this movie? Well, the action is all too literally louder than words. The grieving-dad protagonist, Brian (Joel Kinnaman), can no longer speak after his first attempt at avenging the needless death of his son. Therefore the movie unspools in a storytelling twilight zone where there is virtually no dialogue heard at all. The eerie quiet enshrouding most scenes enhances the inevitable explosions of action in the most visceral way.

MASTER GARDENER (M)

***1/2

Selected cinemas

Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver in Master Gardener.

In recent times, the great screenwriter Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) has finally come into his own as a director, courtesy of two movies that coaxed dynamically nuanced performances from their lead actors. So if you were taken by the work of Ethan Hawke in Schrader’s spellbinding First Reformed, or by Oscar Isaac in the unjustly overlooked The Card Counter, then you must check out Joel Edgerton’s sublime acting display in Master Gardener. In this slow-burning drama, Edgerton plays Narvel, a loner who revels in the repetition of his job as head gardener on a sprawling estate in the American south. While it is obvious Narvel is a man with demons in his past (check out his tattoos for further evidence of a life once mis-lived), he just might be a saint compared to his employer, a particularly unhappy woman named Mrs Haverhill (an imposing Sigourney Weaver). Proceedings do liven up – and yet, refuse to level out – when Narvel is asked by the boss to take on a troubled younger relative as his new assistant. Show this movie some patience, and it will show some rewards in return.