It's a soaring, crashing, blazing affair with pyrotechnic performances by real-life spouses Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez as Lavoe and his wife, Puchi. Like a plane disaster, it holds you in thrall of ¡ay, Dios mio! drama.Read Full Review »
70
Washington Post: Ann Hornaday
A star isn't born in El Cantante as much as it's reconfirmed. She's still here, and she's still got it.Read Full Review »
63
USA Today: Claudia Puig
The music is the uncontested highlight of El Cantante.Read Full Review »
50
Boston Globe: Ty Burr
Ideally, it would give you a sense of an entire people knocking the planet off its axis with a shake of their hips. If only El Cantante were that movie. Instead, it's a curiously sludgy cross between a Doomed Star biopic and a J. Lo vanity project.Read Full Review »
50
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES: Roger Ebert
If you're a fan of Hector Lavoe and Latin music, or Lopez and Anthony, you'll want to see El Cantante for what's good in it. Otherwise, you may be disappointed. The director (Leon Ichaso) and his co-writers haven't licked a crucial question: Why do we need to see this movie and not just listen to the music?Read Full Review »
50
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Scott Brown
Anthony, with his famished thousand-yard stare, turns in a delicate -- perhaps too delicate -- performance more informed by the shadow of Lavoe's death than the spark of his art. And his shrill domestic scenes with Lopez feel small and squalid, as we wait restlessly for the band to play us out.Read Full Review »
50
The New York Times: A.O. Scott
It may be best to approach El Cantante less as a movie than as a two-hour promotional video for a must-have soundtrack album.Read Full Review »
40
Salon.com: Stephanie Zacharek
Before long, El Cantante disintegrates into a stylized jumble -- even a straightforward jumble would have been preferable.Read Full Review »
30
Village Voice: Robert Wilonsky
Focusing almost solely on Lavoe's addictions (drugs and women, ho and hum), El Cantante is a garish, dispiriting bit of work--a mountain of biopic clichés snorted through the lens of a fidgety camera that never pauses long enough for us to get to like (or even know) the man responsible for making the Nuyorican sound a mainstream American commodity in the 1970s and early '80s.Read Full Review »
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