Overall, this kind of compassionate dismantling of Nico the myth is done with insight, tenderness, and clear-eyed realism.

| Dec 26, 2018

Trine Dyrholm as the aging relic is superb, nailing down all the fits of paranoia, druggy ticks, and Nico's own fallen spirit.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 26, 2018

Nicchiarelli and Dyrholm impressively fly in the face of that logic with a film that is eulogistic and hopeful.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 17, 2018

"I'm selective about my audience," says the singer. "I don't need everybody to like me." With a dour, sophisticated film that won't be to everyone's taste, writer-director Nicchiarelli seems to have taken those words to heart.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 17, 2018

Dyrholm is aces as Nico. She uncannily summons the singer's brooding performing style, along with her many complications.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 17, 2018

"Nico, 1988" is worth a look... for its portrait of a spirit absolutely unyielding, who expected the worst from life and found cold, beautiful comfort when she got it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 9, 2018

There is a low-key blandness to Susanna Nicchiarelli's film... elevated by a subtle, powerful performance by German actress Trine Dyrholm, whose complex and spot-on portrayal of Nico gives the film soul, albeit a lonely one.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 9, 2018

The film leaves one feeling that few humans have ever been quite so alone as Christa Päffgen, and yet so crowded.

| Aug 8, 2018

Yet the star of Susanna Nicchiarelli's freely fictionalized biopic, Trine Dyrholm, finds fierce beauty in the woman Nico has become.

| Aug 3, 2018

Instead, she concentrates on how this woman's self-destructive charisma kept people around her and chaos around every corner - this is Nico as a black-hole sun.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 2, 2018

While the film deserves praise for its unglamorous approach to a sad-girl icon, the narrow focus can be tiring, and Nico's relationships with the other characters, including her estranged son, are frustratingly enigmatic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 2, 2018

Dyrholm, an actress of formidable presence who expertly handles her own singing as well as the acting, gives a strong, truthful, unflinching performance that powers the film the way Christa's energy powered the bands she was in those late days.

| Aug 2, 2018

It's a strange but effective music biopic, delighting in the far end of fame and making a studious critical case for the artist's later work that nevertheless lionizes the early stuff.

| Original Score: B | Aug 1, 2018

The movie is best of all a showcase for Dyrholm's full-fledged interpretation of Nico.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 1, 2018

Dyrholm's performance anchors everything. It relies little on physical impersonation, even though her singing voice captures Nico's unmistakable, late-career deadpan cry, a foghorn of mourning that sounded then and now like no one else's.

| Aug 1, 2018

[Dyrholm] plays Nico as perplexing and intriguing, ethereal yet earthy. She manages to make the viewer understand why some people wanted to be around the singer, even though she was demanding, exasperating and untrustworthy - in short, a junkie.

| Aug 1, 2018

[A] precise, piercing study of the star's last years.

| Jul 31, 2018

Ms. Nicchiarelli, using brief archival flickers of Warhol's Factory parties, deftly connects the carefree chaos of Päffgen's past to the dark desperation of her present.

| Jul 31, 2018

The unflashy, austere visual style of the film is but a veneer over writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli's deceptively radical treatment of the musical biopic.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 29, 2018

As a self-obsessed junkie, spectacularly failed mother and demanding diva, there should be nothing sympathetic about her, but Susanna Nicchiarelli's biopic effectively evokes the melancholy of missed greatness.

| Jul 27, 2018