Omnibus movies -- those composed of several individual segments by several individual directors -- can pose a special critical problem, presenting works of wildly different merits under one unifying title. But it perhaps is silly to worry about this, or even to mention it, when the overriding idea is as dubious as the one here: opera as MTV. Ten international directors -- mostly British, and no one Italian, no one German -- offer up visions of varying degrees of irrelevance to their chosen background music, and (more to the point) varying degrees of insipidness in and of themselves. It's surely some measure of how bad a movie Aria is, when Ken Russell, on the roster of ten, cannot be considered a serious candidate, cannot even survive the cut to the top five semi-finalists, for the title of Most Detrimental Teammate. With John Hurt, Theresa Russell, Buck Henry, Beverly D'Angelo; directed by Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, Bill Bryden, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Franc Roddam, Nicolas Roeg, Charles Sturridge, Julien Temple. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.