The Best Movie Yet Written!!!

Rating: 10/10 (22 October 2003)

Without a doubt one of the best movies of all time Amadeus is also the one movie that has it all, drama, laughs, great music, spectacle, and of coarse GREAT ACTING! Is there a better-acted, more thrilling scene in all of cinema than the one at the end between Mozart and Salieri ? F.Murray Abraham and Tom Hulse give us a tour de force that has seldom been seen in movies.	Most people know the story of Amadeus so it's fruitless going into to many of the films main - plot points. It might help to note however that a lot of what is portrayed in the film is fictitious, Salieri didn't actually sit at Mozart's deathbed while he dictated the Requiem, this is fiction, but it is the stuff great dramas are made of. On the director cut version of the film Peter Shaffer explains that the ending is his favorite scene in the whole movie because it is so unlike any other Hollywood movie. Here is a climax of a film and it is basically two men composing a piece of music, no explosion, no shootout, and yet it is exciting. Of coarse the set up and the story of Salieri's mad jealousy are all part why that scene works so well. Many other details of the actual story of Mozart are also fiction yet many other parts of the story are in fact true. By combining fact and myth Peter Shaffer has created a truly great drama. This is also a movie that looks and sounds amazing. And although it evokes the 18th century perhaps more authentically than any movie this is also a film that refuses to take itself too seriously. Milos Forman is a genius for the way he brought this play to the screen. Another director may have made a dull, overly dramatic piece out of Shaffer's play. Instead he choose to make every part of the story interesting, from his "cartoon casting" of secondary roles (the Emperor Joseph and his Court), to his giving us whole Operatic Arias, to his casting of virtually unknowns ( Hulse and F.Murray are brilliant ) in the major roles, Amadeus is about as good as movies get. I love this movie, 10/10.