Metacritic reviews

Anthony doesn't have a large emotional range as an actor, and neither does Lopez. Still, the musical numbers, which constitute a hefty portion of screen time, are thrilling.

A special film, one that refuses to package a person's life into a comfortably familiar genre.

A star isn't born in El Cantante as much as it's reconfirmed. She's still here, and she's still got it.

Unfortunately, the music is as irresistible as the tired story of a musician succumbing to substance abuse is resistible.

Anthony, with his famished thousand-yard stare, turns in a delicate -- perhaps too delicate -- performance more informed by the shadow of Lavoe's death than the spark of his art. And his shrill domestic scenes with Lopez feel small and squalid, as we wait restlessly for the band to play us out.

Turns out to be nothing special. Well, the music is. The storytelling is not.

Anthony delivers a respectable performance, but his character never comes into sharp focus. Consequently, Lavoe emerges as a supporting character in his own story.

A virtual template of every imaginable cliche of the musical biopic, picture suffers from a lack of narrative and character focus

Unfortunately, there's little more than formula in Ichaso's El Cantante.

Focusing almost solely on Lavoe's addictions (drugs and women, ho and hum), El Cantante is a garish, dispiriting bit of work--a mountain of biopic clichés snorted through the lens of a fidgety camera that never pauses long enough for us to get to like (or even know) the man responsible for making the Nuyorican sound a mainstream American commodity in the 1970s and early '80s.