Klimt (2006)

31% of critics liked it
(26 reviews)
31% of users liked it
(3,596 ratings)

Klimt documents the life and work of the influential painter Gustav Klimt who, in addition to creating some of the most well-known pieces of his time, helped create the artistic movement known as the Vienna Secession. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

Play Trailer

Rating, Runtime: Unrated, 50 min.
Directed By: Raoul Ruiz
Written By: Raoul Ruiz
Genres: Documentary, Drama, Special Interest

In Theaters: Jan 1, 2005 Wide
On DVD: Jan 8, 2008
Studio: Outsider Pictures

Critic Reviews

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.
Kamal Al-Solaylee, Globe and Mail
Whatever its flaws may be (and, frankly, they are legion), Raoul Ruiz's latest film is a biopic that mixes and matches visual and narrative styles boldly, wildly, madly enough to invigorate the genre, but not enough to save the movie.
Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Poor excuse for an unconventional biopic.
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.
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 17 critic reviews

Critic ratings and reviews powered by RottenTomatoes.com

Fresh (60% or more critics rated the movie positively)

Rotten (59% or fewer critics rated the movie positively)

Featured Audience Ratings

Walter M

[font=Century Gothic]"Klimt" starts in a hospital in Vienna in 1918 as both the First World War and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are coming to an end. Of all the beds occupied, only the one containing the dying artist Gustav Klimt(John Malkovich) is of interest to the… More
[font=Century Gothic]"Klimt" starts in a hospital in Vienna in 1918 as both the First World War and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are coming to an end. Of all the beds occupied, only the one containing the dying artist Gustav Klimt(John Malkovich) is of interest to the viewer. In his delirium, he thinks back to 1900 and a fateful trip to Paris.[/font] [font=Century Gothic][/font] [font=Century Gothic]Written and directed by Raul Ruiz, "Klimt" is a return to the extreme stream of consciousness territory that he had previously visited with his adaptation of Proust's "Time Regained" which also featured John Malkovich. There are some nice touches with this movie such as the silent movie within a movie and the idea that Klimt represented the first breath of the 20th century in conflict against the dying 19th century. But by venturing too far into a house of mirrors, Ruiz fails to deliver anything of substance concerning the artist, nor is it anywhere near as erotic as it should have been.[/font]