John Malkovich has never been one to play it safe, and his latest on-screen alter ego proves he’s still happiest when he’s being gloriously, theatrically insufferable. The veteran actor is heading to Israel with The Music Critic, a 2018 Swedish-made hybrid of documentary, music, and comedy that’s part concert film, part poison-pen Valentine to the classical canon. Yes, the man who made being creepy look chic in Dangerous Liaisons and turned villainy into an art form in Being John Malkovich is now embodying the world’s most unimpressed listener - and honestly, who better?
The film, directed by Volker Werner, finds Malkovich slipping into the role of a fictional, acid-tongued critic who has apparently never met a masterpiece he couldn’t shred. The premise is deliciously simple: Aleksey Igudesman, a violinist-comedian with a flair for playful provocation, has assembled what the official synopsis calls “a sardonic mix of the most evil music critiques of the last centuries,” aimed squarely at some of the greatest works ever composed. Beethoven? Dreary. Chopin? A snooze. Prokofiev? Please. Malkovich’s narrator isn’t just unimpressed - he’s armed with a “frivolous potpourri of musical insults” that would make a rock critic blush. It’s a role that lets him do what he does best: deploy his signature purr of condescension until you’re not sure whether to laugh or check your own taste in art.
The real twist here is that the film isn’t just Malkovich monologuing in a velvet chair. It’s built around actual performances by Igudesman and his collaborators - including violinist So-Ock Kim, cellist Tanja Tetzlaff, violist Max Baille, and pianist Hyung-Ki Joo - who play the very pieces being mercilessly dissected. So you get the odd, vertiginous sensation of hearing gorgeous music while someone tells you it’s garbage, which is kind of the point. Igudesman, who also appears as himself, has built a career on blending virtuosic musicianship with deadpan humor, and here he’s crafted a stage where the jokes and the scores are equally serious. The result is less a lecture and more a mischievous duel between genius and its grumpiest critic.
Now, about that Israel connection - the article’s headline points to Malkovich returning there with the film, though the provided details keep the actual venue, festival, or event under wraps. What we do know is that The Music Critic has a runtime of 76 minutes, which is just about the perfect length for a swan dive into musical mockery without overstaying its welcome. It first surfaced in December 2018, but projects like this tend to have a long, meandering life on the festival circuit and special screenings, especially when they feature a name as bankable-and-weird as Malkovich’s. For audiences in Israel, this likely represents a chance to see the actor do something far more playful than his usual prestige-drama fare - a reminder that underneath the imposing brow and that voice like slow-dripping honey mixed with gravel, there’s a genuine performer’s glee.
Critics, at least the ones on TMDb, have been less kind than Malkovich’s character is to the composers. The film currently sits at a modest 4.5 out of 10, which suggests that this particular blend of music nerdery and comic performance might not land for everyone. But that feels almost appropriate for a project about the subjectivity of taste. If you’re the sort of person who thinks a documentary about rude historical reviews of Chopin is niche gold, you’ll probably adore it. If you need a plot, you’re in the wrong theater. The joy here is purely tonal - watching a master actor chew scenery that happens to include the moonlit sonata.
It’s also worth noting the format’s genre-blending audacity. Calling The Music Critic a “documentary” feels like a technicality; it’s more of a staged performance piece captured on film, with Igudesman weaving in real historical critiques while Malkovich delivers them as a single, glorious nasty character. The Swedish production, with dialogue in what the metadata lists as the original language of Swedish (though Malkovich performs in English), gives it a distinctly European flavor - one that doesn’t care much for Hollywood’s three-act rules. This is an industry outlier in the best way: a small, weird, brainy experiment that exists because someone thought, “What if John Malkovich called Beethoven boring, but with a string quartet backing him up?” That someone was right.
For fans of Malkovich’s more eccentric side - the man who played a deranged hitman in RED and a talking gorilla in Zootopia - The Music Critic is a reminder that he’ll always carve out space for the strange. And for audiences in Israel, the screening is presumably a chance to see a cult item that never quite broke into the mainstream. Whether you come for the insults or the impeccable musicianship, you’re likely to leave with a grin and a sudden urge to argue with a stranger about Beethoven’s late quartets. Malkovich might think they’re weary and dreary, but that’s exactly why we can’t stop watching him say so.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
