Forman won his second Best Director Oscar for this handsome adaptation
of Peter Shaffer's play, and once again showed how to make accessible,
engaging but intelligent Hollywood films. Abraham's Salieri stands
at its centre, a seething study in sexual repression and frustrated
mediocrity; and as is so often the case with Forman, everything around
him is impeccable - the music, the sets, the costumes, all precisely
rendering a time and place which was turned upside down by the arrival of
the classic Forman outsider, in the person of Hulce's giggling, randy
Mozart.
