The Music Never Stopped: Critic Reviews

Sketchy and heavy on the treacle.

Presumably intended as an inspirational medical drama, this dated effort congeals into stale nostalgia. Mr. Simmons deserves better.

It's sentimental, yet so honest and eccentric that it rises above schmaltz.

Strain is evident elsewhere.

The Music Never Stopped is often static and follows a familiar trajectory. Yet it has power, partly because Simmons does a fine job of showing how hurt Henry is that his taste didn't imprint on Gabe beyond grade school.

A wounded and hopeful take on generation gaps and the wider, nearly unbridgeable chasms created by neurological disaster.

Kohlberg is determined to manipulate your emotions; he succeeds.

The novel premise and otherwise nuanced performances are enough to hold attention.

It sounds like TV-grade schmaltz, but it isn't, thanks to expertly astringent work by Simmons...

This is the kind of warm, uncluttered, feel-good film that you take your parents to see, and I absolutely mean that in a good way.

A sentimental but deeply felt true story about the healing power of music.

A father-son drama that wraps a gripping neurological oddity in comfortably familiar movie sentimentality.

This loosely adapted biopic drawn from the Dr. Oliver Sacks case study, The Last Hippie, resonates with the emotional power of music back in time to heal and awaken broken lives.

It's really for anybody who loves their music -- whatever that music is -- so much that hearing it is enough to transport them to another time and place.

.. it's curious that a film essentially about the healing power of music can be so tone deaf about some of the particulars, this is a movie that some ...baby boomers will absolutely adore. Others should approach with caution.

This heartily maudlin character study is sort of a crash course in Boomerology.

This fact-inspired story from the physician who gave us Awakenings mostly plays like a Lifetime movie.

The treatment of the music alone makes the movie worth seeing, but the sophisticated nature of the narrative builds well on the musical foundation.

Simmons has never been better than he is here, as he transforms Henry from a guy burdened with regret to one bursting with hope.

... radiates good intentions and bland professionalism without ever becoming as moving or inspiring as it seems to want to be.

Some will collapse in tears over this story. Others will remain stone-cold. And still others, like me, will land somewhere in the middle of these extremes.

A medley of "Memento," "The King's Speech" and "Hair," "The Music Never Stopped" is sentimental pop packaged as a profound rock opera.

The Music Never Stopped offers up a fairly predictable medical melodrama.

No matter what, Simmons is worth seeing.

Simmons's talents carry the film, elevating the work of his fellow actors.