Another entry in the list of biopics (like Bohemian Rhapsody) that reduce the career of an iconoclast to a formulaic biopic that refuses to scratch beneath the surface.

| Mar 10, 2020

How do you hew so close to biopic conventions -a dutiful recitation of this event happened, this fame arrived, that tragedy struck, etc - when you're dealing with an artist whose whole raison d'etre was finding beauty at the extreme edges of things?

| Original Score: 0/5 | Mar 22, 2019

If the new biopic "Mapplethorpe" presents this transgressive vision is vivid detail - and it does - that's only because it includes so many of Mapplethorpe's pictures. Everything else in the film is timid and pedestrian.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 13, 2019

There's a way to frame great art and the problematic artists who make it, but "Mapplethorpe" hasn't figured it out.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 6, 2019

It's Mapplethorpe Vanilla.

| Mar 2, 2019

A conventional biopic of renegade photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (a stranded Matt Smith) is a contradiction in terms, the pallid result feeling like an outline for a movie that no one actually made.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 1, 2019

Ultimately the movie, with its gimcrack period pageantry, cannot escape its essential conundrum: that it is subordinate, inferior to the still images that festoon it.

| Mar 1, 2019

A stunningly drab take on the life and legacy of a photographer who merged pornography with grace, Mapplethorpe doesn't have an artistic signature of its own, so much as a name it doesn't live up to.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 1, 2019

There are two things that make the flawed "Mapplethorpe" worth a watch: Matt Smith's dedicated performance, and a reverent inclusion of so much of the artist's work.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 1, 2019

A rare misfire for [Timoner], a case where the filmmaker's career-long immersion in prickly subcultures and extreme personalities wasn't enough to wrestle down one of the most extreme of them all.

| Mar 1, 2019

[D]irector Ondi Timoner... has crafted a stylish, evocative, absorbing snapshot of creative expression, artistic ambition, sexuality and eroticism.

| Feb 28, 2019

Iconic subject, powerful leading performance, but weighed down by a Wikipedia-entry vehicle that seeks to show everything, and as a result, speeds past the moments that would give it real emotional depth.

| Feb 28, 2019

You go away feeling soiled and confused, disliking and distrusting him more than you did going in.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 28, 2019

[It's] most alive when it's putting its subject's pictures on the screen, which it does often. And should have done more, because the movie is otherwise as timid as its subject was bold.

| Feb 28, 2019

This zoetrope-esque blurring ultimately lends Mapplethorpe its edge, as audiences will feel unable to tear themselves away from its protagonist's lavish self-destruction.

| May 8, 2018

Matt Smith and Marianne Rendónare convincing as Mapplethorpe and Smith, but their efforts aside, what a waste.

| May 2, 2018

Smith's performance hints at tightly coiled depths that the movie skates by, and his character becomes easier to resent even when he begins to get sick.

| Original Score: D+ | May 2, 2018

The major thing that Mapplethorpe has in its favor is that the film is afraid of neither the life nor the work of the notorious photographer.

| May 2, 2018

[Smith's] work, sadly, is continuously undermined by everything surrounding him, beginning with a script, written by Timoner and Mikko Alanne, that frustratingly sticks to the then-this-happened conventions of a standard biopic.

| Apr 24, 2018

To her credit, Timoner doesn't shy away from the hardcore bits...but neither does she capture what made the radical photographer tick.

| Apr 23, 2018