"The film offers a rich array of archival footage, interviews, and candid photography, but has no interest in major revelations ... As a director, Howard has always had an interest in sweeping, traditional narrative arcs and it's been evident in his past work as a music documentarian, specifically in 2016's The Beatles: Eight Days a Week and 2013's Jay-Z documentary Made in America. He wants to see his subjects as heroes who step up to the plate and, while Pavarotti is unabashedly fawning in tone, there's also an infectious joy in the approach"

"Viewers are free to wag their fingers at the choices he made, but Howard adopts a no-muss-no-fuss tone of benevolent civility that feels like a legitimate way to go, keeping Pavarotti's identity as a singer front and center. The domestic breakups are about wounds. The genius of Pavarotti's voice is that it had the power to heal. The movie pays ample testament to how that voice, for 40 years, poured out of him, rapturous and tragic, soaring on wings of pure emotion, at times wracked with a spiritual pain that was surely his own, but always lifting his audience to the mountaintop of beauty, saying, "This is where I live. And you can too.""

"A great artist innovates, and Pavarotti's innovation was arguably to take opera out of the hands of snobs and elitists and give it to the ordinary people. But there is very little really engaged discussion of the music. What there is - heart-sinkingly, inevitably - is Bono, who worked with Pavarotti and here firmly asserts his own status as Pavarotti's mega-A-list mate. What a dull nostalgiafest"