Watch The Nutcracker For Free

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

A Masterpiece!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

BEWARE OF BOGUS REVIEWS & REVIEWERS. SOME REVIEWERS HAVE ONLY ONE REVIEW. WHEN ITS A POSITIVE REVIEW THAT TELLS ME THEY WERE INVOLVED WITH THE PRODUCTION. NOW I HAVE REVIEWED OVER 400 Christmas MOVIES. I HAVE NO AGENDA. I AM FARE.The director of "Dirty Dancing" could have done a better job in filming this production. The is not the first feature film to showcase the world's most beloved ballet.This is a huge chore to watch this interpretation of the holiday classic ballet! The Nutcracker tells the story of a young girl whose love for a toy turns it into the handsome prince Macaulay Culkin ("Richie Rich," "Home Alone"), and together they are brought to the Land of Sweets, where an enchanting spectacle awaits them. Directed by Academy Award-winner Emile Ardolino ("Sister Act," "Dirty Dancing") and narrated by Academy Award-winner Kevin Kline ("Dave," "A Fish Called Wanda"). The lack of closeups and static shots hinder the viewer from fulling embracing it. The 1986 Nutcracker: The Motion Picture is a better viewing experience!

The best thing about this movie was the Orchestra and the incomparable Tchaikovsky score. A few of the dancers were literally amazing and virtually all of them were superb. The staginess of the production was very evocative of a live performance. However,the production as a whole detracted from the art we should have gotten. We ordered the DVD in hopes of showing it to our grandchildren, but the score, story and name alterations were so disconcerting that we decided to not introduce them to the Nutcracker this way. Of course, inserting a non-dancer into a ballet is like asking Rosanne Barr to sing at the Met. It is sure to elicit the exclamation: "What WERE you thinking?!?!" and it did. The major complaint about the production as a whole is hard to pin down, but the DVD was disappointing nonetheless. It just lacked the essence of great art. We simply were not "swept away." In general, some performances leave you feeling they were not up to snuff, but this one left us with the feeling of having been affronted. I would love to see it re-shot with a standard plot line, all dancers (no current heartthrobs), and more drive via the editing. One final whine: as the music was the best part, why don't they include the names of the musicians in the end-title roll? It wouldn't take up that much time.The violin solo was one of the high points of the entire performance, yet we got the names of all kinds of tradesmen whose output was indiscernible to us, but not the names of the musicians.

The Nutcracker has always been a somewhat problematic ballet. It bears little resemblance to ETA Hoffman's original story on which it is based.In the ballet, the story is essentially over by the second-half when Clara (or Marie in this version) travels to the Kingdom of Sweets to watch a series of character dances.There's an infinite variety of stage productions that re-interpret the story in myriad ways (not always successfully) to compensate for the ballet's weak libretto.Balanchine's version doesn't really have any sense of drama or story at all (despite the fact that there is plenty of drama and mystery in Tchaikovsky's wonderful first-act music). The result is a completely forgettable first-half Christmas party where hardly anything happens and where even the dancing (the little that there is of it) isn't particularly memorable.The pantomime over-acting, particularly of Drosselmeier, which might look passable on the stage, just looks silly filmed for the big screen.Unfortunately, things aren't much better when we get to the Kingdom of Sweets (Act II in the stage version). Although there are a few choreographic highlights, most of the choreography is bland and uninspiring. This certainly isn't vintage Balanchine.Balanchine is widely regarded as a master of abstract dance, but I have always felt he was less successful as a creator of narrative ballets. Watching this film version of his stage production of The Nutcracker has only re-affirmed this view.

Those who have given this production such a low rating probably have never seen the celebrated George Balanchine production live onstage, or are letting their disdain for the star casting of Macaulay Culkin influence their judgement. The Atlanta Ballet was fortunate enough, from the 1960's to the 1980's, to be the first ballet company authorized to stage this production other than the New York City Ballet, and I have seen it live onstage several times. I can assure readers that the film is a quite accurate rendering of this production, and that the use of a child with limited dancing abilities in the title role is not a cheap stunt dreamed up to showcase Culkin; it was Balanchine's idea to use a child in this role, just as it was his idea to use a child for the role of Marie. The "heavy" dancing is left to the adults in the story.This is deliberately a stagebound film; in a way, it resembles Laurence Olivier's "Othello". Exactly as in that film, the sets of the stage production have been enlarged to the size of a movie soundstage, but not made any less artificial, and the ballet is straightforwardly photographed with discreet closeups, and without the distracting "music video" quick cuts featured in the 1986 overrated Maurice Sendak-Carroll Ballard version. There are only two false steps in this 1993 film. One is the addition of distracting and completely unnecessary sound effects (mouse squeaks, the children whispering "Ma-gic!" to Drosselmeyer,etc.). Those sound effects are never heard in any stage production of any "Nutcracker", and they have been put in as a cheap concession simply to appease unsophisticated audiences who may not relish the idea of watching a ballet on film.The other false step is Macaulay Culkin's nutcracker make-up, which looks absolutely ridiculous. When he is on screen as the Nutcracker, rather than wearing a huge mask (as is always done when the Balanchine production is performed onstage), Culkin is actually made up as the toy - he wears what looks like a bald cap, as well as a white wig, whiskers, and a beard. He also has his face rouged up somewhat, and the worst aspect of his make-up is that it is still recognizably his face, amateurishly transformed in a manner similar to Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr's makeups in "The Wizard of Oz" (that film's makeup results though, worked spectacularly, as this one's does not). And a comparison with Baryshnikov's nutcracker in *his* production shows how wonderfully creative Baryshnikov's nutcracker mask was - the "jaws" actually seemed to move whenever Baryshnikov tilted his head back.The dancing itself in the Macaulay Culkin version is excellent, of course, except for Culkin himself, whose dancing, as I said, isn't meant to even be spectacular. (The Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier are the prominent dancing roles in Balanchine's production of "The Nutcracker".) The film's colors, though, could be a bit brighter since this IS a fantasy. The choreography is also brilliant, and the adaptation of it is so faithful as to include the sequence that features additional music from Tchaikovsky's ballet "The Sleeping Beauty" - as Marie sneaks downstairs, falls asleep on the sofa, and dreams that Drosselmeyer is "repairing" the broken Nutcracker (this sequence was, of course, never included in Tchaikovsky's original ballet---it is the only sequence in this production which features music from a work other than "The Nutcracker").Those who have missed out on this film, or those who despise (or loathe it) should give it a chance, despite its two big drawbacks. It is far better than it seems when one first hears that Culkin is in it.