Little Ashes Reviews
Top Critic
Beltran, for his part, makes a solidly believable Garcia Lorca. The problem is with the man with whom he's obsessed. In Pattinson's performance, we never see what Garcia Lorca sees in Dali.
Even cinematographer Adam Suschitzky's richly textured and resonantly toned cityscapes and rural scenes can't make up for a flawed script and weak performances in what might have been a powerful historical drama.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What's intended to be a daring look at repressed sexuality, three-ways and all, has the dramatic heft of a true-love comic book.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Better to seek out these artists' works firsthand than to settle for this tame rehash, pretty as it may be.
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| Original Score: 2/4
I think you should go ahead and rent the movie.
A noble effort, that ultimately left me disappointed and unfulfilled.
Little Ashes is a case of too little of this and too much of that, and like the rumored affair, nothing of substance to hold on to.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
For much of its running time, Little Ashes wavers between the polite, stuffy style of a Masterpiece Theater production and the more pointed agenda of gay indie cinema.
Director Paul Morrison nicely re-creates the period, but puts too much weight on the sexual relationship as determining the men's artistic courses.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The tangled three-way friendship of Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca could make for a fascinating movie. Instead, we have Little Ashes.
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| Original Score: 1.5/5
In the end, it doesn't satisfy as fact-based bio or love story, but we appreciate the effort.
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| Original Score: 2/6
The meandering film has moments of urgency, particularly when it focuses on Lorca, his growing politicization and the mystery surrounding his disappearance. But that arrives too late to redeem what has gone before.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Little Ashes is absorbing but not compelling. Most of its action is inward.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Pattinson and Beltran are stuck with a rudderless script, and they make a soft, dull pair.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
Artists' lives are rarely as interesting as their art, and Little Ashes risks trivializing its subjects' work as mere responses to history.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/6
A typically bombastic lives-of-the-artists production made even more stilted by having all the actors (including the Spanish ones) speak accented English.
All of the technical credits are outstanding; it's the diffuse script that disappoints.
