Frida: Critic Reviews

A revolutionary life has rarely felt less edgy, or the biography of an iconoclast more bourgeois.

The further it strays from sober naturalism, the better Frida is.

This is undoubtedly the strongest performance of [Hayek's] career, and her passion for the project is palpable.

Endlessly interesting.

The movie is amazingly flat for a film about Kahlo.

Frida is intended to spread the word that Kahlo, a surrealist of surpassing self-investigation, was a firebrand and a legend. So why tell her story like a runny soap opera?

The impressionist model might have served Taymor better than her Frida's straightforward script, which is ultimately overwhelmed with incident and suggests the labor of many hands.

As a kind of colorful, dramatized PBS program, Frida gets the job done. But, for that, why not watch a documentary?

Like the artists it celebrates, Frida is audacious and haunting.

[The screenplay's] flatness ultimately defeats a film that's always a treat to look at.

Sometimes we feel as if the film careens from one colorful event to another without respite, but sometimes it must have seemed to Frida Kahlo as if her life did, too.

A movie that seizes you up, catches fire and dances.

A dynamic portrait of an artist by an artist, one as wry, audacious and erotically charged as its flamboyant subject.

Passionate, provocative, hilarious, tragic and just dizzyingly beautiful to behold.

Taymor, the creative mind behind Broadway's The Lion King, fills Frida with brilliant, surreal flourishes...a rich, funny and sometimes erotic film about an inspiring and influential figure in 20th-century art.

Ms. Taymor gets magnificent performances from Ms. Hayek as Frida and Alfred Molina as the oversexed Diego Rivera.

The greatest movie about an artist since Vincente Minnelli grafted the psychological turmoil of Vincent Van Gogh onto the screen in Lust for Life.

Bringing a fiery warmth and accessibility to the central role, [Hayek] proves a good match for the artist as she depicts Kahlo's indomitable will to live, love and paint.

Brilliantly captures the brightness of the light, the intensity of the colors and the omnipresence of Mexican motifs that informed Kahlo's art.

A few sublime and moving moments interrupting an otherwise pedestrian movie biography.

The movie should more properly have been called Frida And Diego, but there's no denying Hayek's incendiary performance, which Taymor fires up with surrealistic flourishes straight out of Kahlo's dreams and nightmares.

A biopic of an artist that actually looks artistic.

Taymor's movie version of Kahlo's life, Frida, makes the artist seem more like a human being and less like a craft-fair novelty than she has in years.