This film had a great opportunity to take a once-in-a-lifetime story about a troubled, legendary singer, and add insight. Nina, in the most frustrating way, bungles that mission.

| Nov 7, 2016

An insult to the legacy of the High Priestess of Soul, those looking for a richer exploration of the woman, artist, activist and legend, are best served elsewhere.

| Original Score: D | May 18, 2016

Never seems authentic or real, just a bizarrely staged re-creation.

| May 5, 2016

Respectfully factual in its over-all contours but sensational and sentimental nonetheless, the movie reduces Simone's life to clichés about hope; it replaces the creative drive with the commercial one, the artist with the celebrity.

| Apr 25, 2016

Saldana does a fine job of delivering the lyrics -- a daunting task for any actress required to step into those vocals, but fans of Simone will be aching for the real deal.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 22, 2016

A Nina Simone novice seeing this picture would have no idea who this complex, magnificent artist was, or why she mattered.

| Apr 22, 2016

Why Mort, who wrote and directed the film, has chosen to focus on Simone's troubled 1990s period in France is anyone's guess.

| Apr 22, 2016

The word on this Nina Simone biopic has been so toxic for so long - it was filmed in 2012 but only released now - I was really hoping to find something good in it. No luck.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Apr 22, 2016

A listless, oddly constructed tale that does a poor job of capturing Simone's star quality or indomitable racial pride ...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 22, 2016

You'll see some durable makeup in "Nina." What you won't see is any justification why this film should exist.

| Original Score: 0/4 | Apr 22, 2016

Writer-director Cynthia Mort focuses on Simone's late-career relationship with her nurse-turned-manager, and isn't able to branch out and grasp the story of Simone's art or her impact.

| Original Score: C- | Apr 22, 2016

Ms. Mort's writing lacks psychological texture, and her direction generates little intensity, or even continuity.

| Apr 21, 2016

Writer-director Cynthia Mort seems entirely in over her head while attempting to flesh out this legendary, complicated, volatile artist.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Apr 21, 2016

Coming less than a year after What Happened, Miss Simone? the fiction film Nina may feel even shabbier than it is. And it is shabby, as well as disjointed, superficial and just plain dull, a dislikable rendering of a tumultuous life.

| Apr 21, 2016

Writer/director Cynthia Mort tells this story well enough, but we're still left wondering why she chose this story to begin with.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 21, 2016

"Nina" filters the singer's voice - and her life - through tinny-sounding speakers and an out-of-focus lens.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 21, 2016

Nina has been so thoroughly misconceived, on virtually every level, that the only less interesting portrait imaginable would be one that takes place entirely when Nina Simone was in utero.

| Original Score: D+ | Apr 21, 2016

Nina's true, accidental subject quickly reveals itself as the irreducibility of Simone herself: Little of her genius and complexity have been squeezed into this film's familiar three-act structure of friendship and redemption.

| Apr 20, 2016

The film is committed to the sort of broad strokes that reduce a great artist's life to a spectacle of self-pity.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Apr 20, 2016

While not a disaster for the ages, there's still a lot to Nina that feels like a fib.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 20, 2016