The whole dream-like effect the film strives for is undermined by the poor acting.
Comment
06/09/07
Klimt (2006)
29 %
Reviews Counted: 24 Fresh: 7 Rotten:17 Average Rating: 5/10
Consensus:
Klimt is handsomely filmed, but the blurred storyline and substandard performances prove its undoing.
Rated: 15
Runtime: 1 hr 37 mins
Theatrical Release: 01-06-2007
Synopsis: Popular Austrian painter Gustav Klimt is portrayed by John Malkovich in this dramatic biopic by director Raoul Ruiz. [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: John Malkovich, Veronica Ferres, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Dillane, Paul Hilton
Reviews
Top Critic
Saffron Burrows is a stand-out as a provocative actress (and very possibly her mischievous lookalike), but it's not enough to make the muddled plot engaging, or fit for comparison with Klimt's stunning work.
06/05/07
Top Critic
A beautifully designed but ponderously executed attempt to summon up the spirit of the Austrian fin-de-siècle painter.
06/02/07
Top Critic
It’s not unintriguing, but without anything resembling a dramatic progression, the going soon gets stodgy.
05/31/07
Top Critic
Imagining an artist’s life as little more than a series of portentous set pieces, [director] Ruiz, who also wrote the script, has made a film that is neither portrait nor allegory but empty ornamentalism.
11/12/07
Raoul Ruiz's absurdly overwrought phantasmagoria tries to recast the notorious Viennese artist's life as a kind of Divine Comedy: Inferno.
10/19/07
The film, however provocative and full of eye candy, is really for hardcore art-house fans only.
10/19/07
John Malkovich has virtually cornered the market on portraying aesthetes in the thrall of demonic visions. Klimt adds to his gallery of elegant monsters.
10/17/07
Top Critic
A good bio of any historical character has to have a compelling story, whether evil or good. Klimt appears to have had that story. I sure would have liked to know what it was.
09/14/07
Ruiz is terrific in evoking a heady atmosphere of ornate fin de siecle decadence, and Malkovich is ideally cast as a coolly intellectual, free-thinking, free-living aesthete...
08/31/07
Top Critic
Klimt is obviously not a dumb film, but it is one big ol' fruitcake of a movie.
08/31/07
Fact, fiction and chronology are juggled and blurred with such abandon that piecing it all together is bound to be a fruitless and frustrating effort.
08/31/07
Ruiz is so intent on harnessing the painter to his own -- here, rather arid -- relativism that he never manages to convey the unfettered eros that brings crowds flocking to exhibitions of Klimt’s work, even as critics hold their noses.
08/30/07
Klimt comes across as a lovely but unfathomable object, and an inadvertent case study in the argument for the ultimate integrity of Klimt's art.
08/10/07
In the end, all the effort adds up to naught, except a hunger for the salient details the movie missed.
08/10/07
Whatever its flaws may be (and, frankly, they are legion), Raoul Ruiz's latest film is a biopic that mixes and matches visual and narrative styles boldly, wildly, madly enough to invigorate the genre, but not enough to save the movie.
08/10/07
An almost unbearable collection of monologues with no regard for substantive or involving dialogue, the film sheds little or no light on the genius behind some extraordinary artwork.
08/10/07
IGN RSS Feeds