Rating: 
Summary: This is defintely not the Carmen to own.
Review: This offering got off on the wrong foot with me with the gratuitous begining scene of an innocent bull being tortured in a bull ring.Opera is a total experience but rests firmly on the conductor and the singers, those requirements are not met here,
the visual effects of the on location shoot do not compensate for the mediocre totality. If you are going to own one visual Carmen, let it be the 1982 Baltsa/Carreras, if you are primarily interested in the vocal performance then you must own 1964 Callas/Gedda (finest Don Jose ever)on CD, or the De Los Angeles/Gedda (forgotten performance date)Domingo gives a far more vocally convincing performance in the Covent Garden production w/ Denyce Graves, who not only presents herself well but can also sing.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful.
Review: This film version of Carmen is outstanding. It captures the lifestyle of the peasants perfectly, and shows how Carmen compensates for her social status with her beauty and her skill of manipulating men.
I usually prefer stage performances, but this one is a winner; I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: the best
Review: this is the best carmen video, bar none. it has an unbeatable cast. migenes is a miracle as carmen. you won't see a better acted performance. and considering the recording was made before the film, it's amazing how well thought out her singing is, just the right emphasis being placed on every word. remarkable! domingo matches her word for word, and raimondi is a suave and commanding escamillo. the natural setting doesn't always work for opera, but here the open spaces give the performances room to breath, which is important because this IS an opera about freedom, sexual and otherwise. migenes, especially, takes full advantage of this. just look at her habanera, how she dances around, mesmerizing as much with her body language as with her bewitching words. this is how the habanera should be sung. wonderful. and she does the same with her other numbers. this is the best carmen video money can buy.
Rating:
Summary: not an opera fan but great film
Review: After reading 'The Sun Also Rises' I thought of Carmen as a follow up to my curiosities of the cultures in Spain. Although this story was reconstituted by a French composer, I saw this as a Spanish story and who doesn't like the story of falling obsessively in love with a wild temptress to the brink of insane jealousy. But with that said you're probably not here just to learn about the story because you can just look it up somewhere else nor should take my word with how the performers performed because there are critics out there that probably have a better understanding of what makes a singer better technically than the other. I think this movie is good because of how the movie was shot on location in Spain. The movie shot on location in various locations of the town with the tobacco factory and the fortress where the soldiers were stationed. Also the dance sequences and costumes of the actors were pretty good in depicting the free spiritedness of the gypsies in the gypsy song segment as well as the procession of the matadors in the final act of the movie.
All in all a great first for learning about telling a story in song.
Rating:
Summary: This Carmen Makes One Perfect
Review: If Friedrich Nietzsche watched Carmen twenty times, then why can't we? But which version? Perhaps this is one time that purists should deviate from their allegiance to staged productions and buy the on-location movie, directed by Francesco Rosi and starring Julia Migenes-Johnson as Carmen and Placido Domingo as Don Jose. Granted, the Covent Garden production featuring Maria Ewing as Carmen has many stellar qualities as well. But in it Nuria Espert, the renowned actress/director, chose to portray Carmen as such a cruel figure that her sexuality is confuted by her eagerness to harm others. This is not the Carmen that Bizet had in mind nor the one portrayed in Rosi's film. Rosi's Carmen, Migenes-Johnson, demonstrates an exquisite dramatic ability from beginning to end, with eyes, body, and voice able to project defiance, sexuality, disgust, and even resignation as the occasion demands. She dances and strips steamily for Don Jose at Lilla Pastia's tavern and manages somehow a perfect foot flick of her skirt into the hands of that poor sap as he awaits the consummation of his fantasy, grown that much stronger from a month's incarceration on Carmen's account. But Carmen can be fatalistic as well, as when she reads the cards forecasting her death at the beginning of Act III, or sad, so very sad, outside the bullring at the conclusion of the opera when she goes to meet her fate. Everything in this production is sung well, including the part of Escamillo, played by the dashing Ruggero Raimondi, and the part of Michaela, played by the necessarily sweet Faith Esham. Domingo, of course, is in his prime. No other version of Carmen so vividly portrays the essential conflict of the opera: that of duty, honor and obedience on the one hand and freedom and sexuality on the other. The soldier's life versus the gypsy's. Rosi's decision to begin the movie with the bullfight scene and the actual killing of a bull (Note that there is no disclaimer about no animals being killed in the making of the film) is brilliant. We start with a bullfight and end with a bullfight. Begin with the inevitable death of a toro and end with the inevitable death of Carmen. There is a perfect metaphorical parallelism here. For what is Carmen's story but that of unbridled wildness necessarily killed off? Rosi's location filming of Carmen succeeds in representing a time and place more engagingly and thoroughly than any stage production could. The harsh light of southern Spain quickly draws the viewer into the ambience of Seville. The tobacco factory is a marvelous exercise in controlled pandemonium mixed with pre-industrial production (notice the babies and toddlers in the factory and the gaiety of the women workers). The gypsy encampment is so very picturesque in Act II. And everywhere in this movie there is dust. There must be dust. This sense of verisimilitude and chronological and scenic appropriateness are enhanced by superb camera work, terrific interior lighting, and a genius's sense of film composition. Many times while viewing this Carmen I hit "pause" on my DVD remote control so that I could admire the spatial construction and lighting of a particular shot. "Like a painting," I would say to myself, "Like a painting." Nietzsche wrote about Carmen: "How such a work makes one perfect. One becomes a `masterpiece' oneself." This is a good version of Carmen on which to test Nietzsche's theory.
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