Critics Aren't Going Gaga for House of Gucci

Critics say the new Ridley Scott true-crime drama The House of Gucci looked great on paper, with Lady Gaga starring alongside Jared Leto, Al Pacino, and Jeremy Irons in a sprawling tale of the Italian fashion family's downfall, but many consider the finished product a disappointment. Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani, who went to prison for orchestrating the 1995 murder of ex-husband Maurizio Gucci. Here's what they're saying:

• "Unambitious and underwhelming." Alessa Dominguez at BuzzFeed says the "unambitious and underwhelming" movie is "weighed down with dad jokes, bad plotting, and thin characterization." She says it is too beholden to its "humdrum source material"—journalist Sara Gay Forden’s 2001 book of the same name.

• "No soul to the character." Johnny Oleksinski at the New York Post isn't sure why the assassination and trial were left to the last 10 minutes of the film, with a "glacial yet completely uninformative history of the luxe brand" taking up the previous two-and-a-half hours. He also wonders why Gaga's Italian character has an accent "as Russian as Boris and Natasha." He says the singer "focuses so much on tics and facial expressions and her Slavic accent that there’s no soul, genuineness or vulnerability to the character."
• A "dire miscalculation." Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair also found that the movie was bogged down by business dealings. He says the "curiously drab" movie made "a dire miscalculation in its calibration of the personal lives and the business"—although "there are plenty of gorgeously decadent outfits to savor."
• "Gloriously decadent." Lindsey Bahr at the AP enjoyed the "stupidly watchable" film more than many of her fellow critics did. She says Scott did justice to the "fascinating and insane" story of the Gucci family. "Everything in 'House of Gucci' is over the top," she writes. "The accents. The performances. The fashion. The settings. The runtime. The music. The greed. This movie knows exactly what it is and, sweetie, it is gloriously decadent, ridiculous fun."

(More movie review stories.)