A new biopic about Amy Winehouse, titled Back to Black, is coming out this week, but don't get too excited yet.
Unfortunately, the film — which was directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and stars Marisa Abela as the gone-too-soon singer — is getting positively berated by critics in their official reviews.
Hamish MacBain at The Standard gave the film one star out of five, kicking off his review with the line: "Before we even get to the deep moral and ethical problems, Back to Black is, on the most basic of levels, a poor, poor piece of filmmaking."
He ends his utter take-down with the sentence: "The final scene, in particular, with its completely and utterly baseless, sensationalist implications, made me physically gasp in horror."
Whew.
The Hollywood Reporter, which praises Marisa's acting performance, skewers her musical chops. "Not necessarily a singer by trade, the actress reportedly took hours upon hours of music lessons to get to a place where she could mimic Winehouse’s singing on stage," wrote critic Leslie Felperin. "But the end result still sounds auto-tuned up the wazoo, zhuzhed further with great dollops of coloratura note-bending and wailing."
Leslie also accuses the director of having "a certain facile interest in surface, an obsession with celebrity and fame that lacks insight, a pop video-deep approach to narrative."
Empire's Hayley Campbell gives the flick a generous two stars out of five, and calls Marisa's a "solid performance let down by a script that cherry-picks the facts and ultimately tells us less than we already know."
The Independent's Charlotte O'Sullivan called the film "cringeworthy," while The Daily Mail's Peter Hoskin urged: "So if they try to make you watch this movie, say: no, no, no."
Still, it's not all bad, and The Guardian awarded Back to Black a respectable four stars, and at time of writing, it is still over the "certified fresh" threshold on Rotten Tomatoes — just about.
