Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life Reviews
Top CriticIt's a comic-strip version of one man's life and times, but it's tres cool.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
While the movie's on a roll, it's zesty, engaging and frisky.
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| Original Score: 3/5
In short, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is a charmer.
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| Original Score: 3/4
French pop star Serge Gainsbourg was as much iconoclast as icon, so it's fitting that this fanciful biopic is both affectionate and irreverent.
Alas, "Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life" loses steam and grows more perfunctory as it wears on.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It's the story of a genius with no moral sense and no interests beyond sensuality. The catchy, insinuating music can only carry you so far.
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| Original Score: 2/4
For better and for worse, Sfar's a fan, and his movie is a busy love letter to Gainsbourg that skates along the surface of the legend.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Why was Gainsbourg a hero? The film leaves the question hanging. I am afraid it was only because, like Sinatra, he did it his way. Which no one can deny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A viewer who comes into "Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life" knowing nothing about Serge Gainsbourg will not come out the other side especially enlightened about the late French-Jewish singer-songwriter's life, least of all why it is heroic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life accepts its subject on his own terms. And the compromise feels like capitulation before its hero's last record spins to a close.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
While Sfar doesn't dare tinker with the facts or sully the mystique, he gains enormous traction via the imaginative and subversive manner he has devised to tell a story that, in many ways, is hard to believe.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A sloggy fantasia about Gainsbourg's life featuring such oddities as a giant, hook-nosed puppet that acts as the singer's alter ego, as well as a parade of showy sequences involving grand Gainsbourg amours Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
A lively bout between bio-pic and fairy tale.
If only all biopics were as entertaining as this...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Unconventional, imaginative, nothing if not audacious, "Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life" is a portrait of creativity from the inside, a serious yet playful attempt to find an artistic way to tell an emotional truth.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
One could hardly make an honest movie about Gainsbourg that wasn't as recklessly ambitious as this.
Beyond its fantasy elements, Sfar's film doesn't color outside the lines as much as he might like us to think.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5.8/10
There's one good reason to see this biopic of the French pop-cabaret songster Serge Gainsbourg, and that's its lead actor, Erik Elmosnino.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Despite the attention the film pays to the divide between the man as the ungainly, loving second-gen immigrant versus the boozy provocateur, it's not a portrait of much psychological depth.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Laetitia Casta steals the movie as Bardot, slinking down the hall in a miniskirt and knee-high black boots, leading a dog on a leash, then cavorting nude behind a bedsheet as Gainsbourg knocks out a song on the piano.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Still, for all the 40-year-old filmmaker's interpolated animations and puppets, for the insouciant, slapdash tone that characterizes his graphic novels, and for his protagonist's proclivity for scandal, the movie is too timidly conceived by half.
Lacks either the dramatic intensity or the arresting insight that might have lifted it out of the pedestrian realm of the admiring biopic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Biopic of French proto-punk starts well but loses focus.
Both evocative and faithful in its depiction of the famed French singer's lascivious life, Gainsbourg (vie heroique) offers up a feast of memorable chansons and an almost endless parade of drop-dead-gorgeous muses.
