44
Metascore
20 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 70Screen DailyDavid D'ArcyScreen DailyDavid D'ArcyThe 12-year project – commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation – is evidence that Timoner, who made documentaries before, can craft a nuanced dramatic feature.
- 70Film ThreatLorry KiktaFilm ThreatLorry KiktaOverall, I would recommend seeing this film if you are a fan of Mapplethorpe’s work, the New York art world, or of Matt Smith. He gives a bravura performance which outshines everything and everyone on screen.
- 60TheWrapDan CallahanTheWrapDan CallahanEven if budgetary restraints sometimes keep Timoner from fully capturing the time she is re-creating, nothing holds Smith back from making Mapplethorpe come alive again, in every sense.
- 58The Film StageJohn FinkThe Film StageJohn FinkFronted by a fine performance by Matt Smith, Mapplethorpe plays it safe with a subject that’s anything but.
- 40The Hollywood ReporterKeith UhlichThe Hollywood ReporterKeith UhlichThis is, in abstract, a bold and brilliant performance, an act of possession, really, and Smith never personally steps wrong in the film’s 96 minutes. But his 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.
- 40VarietyPeter DebrugeVarietyPeter DebrugeTo rob Mapplethorpe of his controversy is to strip the movie of its dramatic conflict. By doing so, the script (co-written with Mikko Alanne) reduces to a rather banal biopic, reenacting how a scrappy outsider achieved unconventional success.
- 40Rolling StonePeter TraversRolling StonePeter TraversWhat’s missing are the moments in between that actually make up a life and give it emotional resonance.
- 38Slant MagazineRichard Scott LarsonSlant MagazineRichard Scott LarsonIn Mapplethorpe, the ultimate purpose of the film seems to be the reductive portrayal of the artist as yet another tormented queer destroyed by his tendencies toward vice.
- 33IndieWireDavid EhrlichIndieWireDavid EhrlichThis runaway train of a biopic renders an iconoclast in the most generic of terms, straining Mapplethorpe’s brief life into a series of bullet-points that feed into each other with all the drama of a Wikipedia page, and a fraction of the context.
- 30The New York TimesGlenn KennyThe New York TimesGlenn KennyMapplethorpe, directed by Ondi Timoner, is a fictionalized biography of the photographer that is 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.