Critic Reviews

• Melissa Anderson, Time Out New York

  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.

• Stephen Holden, New York Times

  John Malkovich has virtually cornered the market on portraying aesthetes in the thrall of demonic visions. Klimt adds to his gallery of elegant monsters.

• Leba Hertz, San Francisco Chronicle

  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.

• Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

  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...

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

  [It's] an eyeful.

• Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star

  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.

• Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

  Poor excuse for an unconventional biopic.

• Ken Fox, TV Guide's Movie Guide

  Raoul Ruiz's absurdly overwrought phantasmagoria tries to recast the notorious Viennese artist's life as a kind of Divine Comedy: Inferno.

• Doris Toumarkine, Film Journal International

  The film, however provocative and full of eye candy, is really for hardcore art-house fans only.

• Beverly Berning, culturevulture.net

  Klimt is a feast for the eyes and the mind.

• Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News

  Klimt is obviously not a dumb film, but it is one big ol' fruitcake of a movie.

• Wade Major, Boxoffice Magazine

  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.

• Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly

  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.

• Jim Slotek, Jam! Movies

  In the end, all the effort adds up to naught, except a hunger for the salient details the movie missed.

• Angela Baldassarre, Sympatico.ca

  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.

• Pam Grady, Reel.com

  A handsome film, but no amount of superior art direction or glittering surface can obscure the rigor mortis that engulfs the drama.

Read all 16 critic reviews