A Star Is Born: Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper get rave reviews

Critics have largely focused on Lady Gaga's performance and Bradley Cooper's directing in this remake of the Hollywood musical

Lady Gaga is being praised for her performance in Bradley Cooper's remake of Hollywood musical A Star Is Born.

Cooper made his directorial debut with the film and also acts opposite Gaga as alcoholic country rock star Jackson Maine, who discovers singer Ally singing in a bar.

Since the film made its debut at Venice Film Festival, critics have been raving about the chemistry between Cooper and Gaga, Cooper's directing, and the way in which the story has been retold.

Variety called the film "stunning" and said "to say [he] does a good job [of directing] would be to understate his accomplishment.

"As a filmmaker, Bradley Cooper gets right onto the high wire, staging scenes that take their time and play out with a shaggy intimacy that’s shorn of the usual “beats”. The new Star Is Born is a total emotional knockout, but it’s also a movie that gets you to believe, at every step, in the complicated rapture of the story it’s telling."

The Guardian awarded the film five stars and said: "Cooper directs and co-stars in this outrageously watchable and colossally enjoyable new version, supercharged with dilithium crystals of pure melodrama.

"He appears opposite a sensationally good Lady Gaga, whose ability to be part ordinary person, part extraterrestrial celebrity empress functions at the highest level at all times."

The Hollywood Reporter said: "There's freshness in the pared-back narrative shorthand of these scenes, as there is in Ally's navigation of Jack's excesses, on one hand giving him his space while on the other letting him know she won't keep following him down his dark spiral. His issues are worsened by an acrimonious split from his much older half-brother and manager, Bobby (Sam Elliott, bringing his customary weathered integrity), and by the deterioration of a longtime hearing impairment."

The Evening Standard gave the film four stars and commented: "Cooper has succeeded in giving this dinosaur of a film stomping new life. This is A Star Is Born re-made for the age of the talent contest. It was never going to be subtle."

Among the less enthusiastic reviews was The Independent's, with critic Geoffrey Macnab giving the film three stars and writing: "The filmmakers catch the rawness and excitement of the live shows as well as the toll they take on Jackson. His hearing is going. There is a very realistic seeming recreation of an awards show at which Jackson disgraces himself and an excruciating scene at a Roy Orbison tribute event at which he can’t play in tune. It is perverse, though, to set the film in the world of country rock.

He added: "It would surely have made much more sense to have tried to make this version of A Star Is Born more urban and more contemporary - and to have given Lady Gaga the chance to dress up and provoke us a bit more."

A Star Is Born is scheduled for release on 5 October.