As for myself, I usually can't watch classic operas being modernized. "Aida" with fireworks and circus gymnasts or "Tristan and Isolde" with mobile phones and handguns – no, thank you. The only exception is Mozart's "The Magic Flute": in my opinion, its surrealistic libretto can survive any modernization. I see that the reviews for Branagh's adaptation are quite mixed, but I generally liked it. Joseph Kaiser is a great Tamino, Amy Carson is excellent as Pamina. Benjamin Davis may not have a very strong voice, but he has the cheerfulness and charm of Mozart's Papageno. The rest of the cast also fit their roles wonderfully. The Masonic references are gone, but the rest of the libretto is preserved, with all its humor and fairytale aura. There are only two moments in the film that really annoyed me. First, the combination of the overture with battle scenes. It looked, well, odd. Second, the suicide of the villains – the episode seemed a bit rushed and not quite understandable. I can see why the Queen of the Night killed herself, with her terrible pride. I can see why Monostatos killed himself, with his maniacal passion for Pamina. But the three ladies? Had they climbed up and agreed to serve Sarastro, he'd have pardoned them for sure (he'd have pardoned everyone, judging by his face). Of course, they could have been enormously devoted to the Queen… Their suicide was something of an unsolved mystery. But overall, the film is definitely a very nice one.

It's a sad fact but the libretto of Die Zauberfloete is quite... weak. This film has done the amazing achievement of lifting up the story line and making in it not only beautiful in music and decors, but also interesting to follow and understandable! Chapeau. What a great movie. The Papageno-Papagena sound at the end is a masterpiece and is a perfect capture of the theme behind the scene. It's uplifting and joyful, and the voices are perfectly acceptable to very good. It's at the same pleasure level as La Traviatta of Franco Zefirelli. And I have to say it takes guts to revisit this story with a WW1 theme and achieving such a nice result.

Kenneth Branagh could well have subtitled his second turkey in as many weeks and his third this year The Cranes Are Flying for yes, folks, our Ken has discovered a thing that you can mount the camera on and it will then climb in the air and allow you to shoot the film from the point of view of a cloud and that's his angle of choice for a good 30 per cent of the running time; if this was a ploy to detract from his lack of ideas then it doesn't work and only draws attention to the pretentiousness on display. It's got to be a prime gobbler when Liz Smith pointedly excludes it from her CV and presumably asked for her name to be removed from the credits. Stephen Fry has the chutzpah to take a bow for the lyrics; it's patently obvious that he has never heard of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Frank Loesser, etc, let alone studied them, in fact if it comes to that he hasn't even bothered to study a Rhyming Dictionary and is clearly a paid-up member of the Kiss My Assonance School Of Lyric Writing. Branagh himself is clearly an advocate of the If It Ain't Broke, Break It, brigade for having set Shakespeare in Japan earlier in the year he now sets Mozart in the First World War but not the one you may have seen in the newsreels where the trenches were furnished with a melange of mud and rats; you could EAT off the floors of these trenches and though he allows an occasional rifle shot for authenticity infantrymen topple over without so much as a scratch let alone any of that nasty blood. This doesn't leave a lot on the positive side; okay, the singers Mime effectively enough, they are, after all, mostly trained opera singers but apart from that there's a two-hour gap where the film should be.

Ingmar Bergman had the right idea -- present 'The Magic Flute' as a filmed stage presentation, complete with audience, intermission and a certain amount of behind-the-scenes byplay. Branagh's version suffers from being a straight movie, more-or-less realistically filmed, though with an overabundance of Art Direction and Set Design, and cheap CGI for the magical effects. The stage gives the distance that allows enchantment, the film's realism negates that. The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life. Would it have been better if the budget had been bigger? Possibly, but maybe not. The story is sweet, but, in fact, rather silly - Schickaneder was, after all, not Goethe. In the post-'Lord of the Rings' era we expect our heroes to undergo rather tougher trials in pursuit of the Magic Dingus, and we expect our villains to be more effectual. Dramatic conflict is on the low side of gripping. That said, the movie was generally pretty to look at, the singers were good-looking and svelte, their acting was pretty decent, ***** the MUSIC WAS GLORIOUS *****, and they sang it well. I sat the whole time with a smile on my face, my soul vibrating along with the singers' vocal cords. Somebody, I hope, will tell Kenneth Branagh that the circling-camera trick is corny. And tell Mr. Frye that double (feminine) rhymes, though all right in an inflected language like German, sound goofy in English.