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Klimt

Klimt (2006)

tomatometer

31

Average Rating: 5/10
Reviews Counted: 26
Fresh: 8 | Rotten: 18

Klimt is handsomely filmed, but the blurred storyline and substandard performances prove its undoing.

50

Average Rating: 5.6/10
Critic Reviews: 8
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 4

Klimt is handsomely filmed, but the blurred storyline and substandard performances prove its undoing.

audience

31

liked it
Average Rating: 2.7/5
User Ratings: 3,596

My Rating

Movie Info

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

Unrated, 50 min.

Documentary, Drama, Special Interest

Raoul Ruiz

Jan 8, 2008

Outsider Pictures

All Critics (26) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (8) | Rotten (18) | DVD (2)

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

October 17, 2007 Comment
New York Times
Top Critic IconTop Critic

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.

September 14, 2007 Full Review Source: San Francisco Chronicle | Comment
San Francisco Chronicle
Top Critic IconTop Critic

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...

August 31, 2007 Full Review Source: Los Angeles Times | Comment
Los Angeles Times
Top Critic IconTop Critic

[It's] an eyeful.

August 30, 2007 Full Review Source: Chicago Reader | Comment
Chicago Reader
Top Critic IconTop Critic

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.

August 10, 2007 Full Review Source: Toronto Star | Comment
Toronto Star
Top Critic IconTop Critic

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.

August 10, 2007 Full Review Source: Globe and Mail | Comment
Globe and Mail
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Poor excuse for an unconventional biopic.

February 23, 2008 Full Review Source: Ozus' World Movie Reviews | Comment
Ozus' World Movie Reviews

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.

November 12, 2007 Full Review Source: Time Out New York | Comment
Time Out New York

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

October 19, 2007 Full Review Source: TV Guide's Movie Guide | Comment
TV Guide's Movie Guide

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

October 19, 2007 Full Review Source: Film Journal International | Comment
Film Journal International

Klimt is a feast for the eyes and the mind.

October 17, 2007 Full Review Source: culturevulture.net | Comment
culturevulture.net

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

August 31, 2007 Full Review Source: Los Angeles Daily News | Comment
Los Angeles Daily News

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.

August 31, 2007 Full Review Source: Boxoffice Magazine | Comment
Boxoffice Magazine

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.

August 30, 2007 Full Review Source: L.A. Weekly | Comment
L.A. Weekly

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

August 10, 2007 Full Review Source: Jam! Movies | Comment
Jam! Movies

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.

August 10, 2007 Full Review Source: Sympatico.ca | Comment

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

June 22, 2007 Comment
Reel.com
More Critic Reviews

Audience Reviews for Klimt

"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

October 25, 2008
Harlequin68
Walter M.

Super Reviewer

i've never seen an art film that moves a mile a minute. well, it's not exactly an art film, but a film about art... there's plenty of pretense to make up for that though. still, anything that can help me get into the heads of artists i love is fantastic, so i found this pretty good if somewhat impenetrable in places.

March 7, 2010
acknowledge101
Brad C.

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