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A film of vitality, with imagery as haunting and romantic as it is intense.
Modigliani is slow, shamefully cliched and disjointed as a cubist portrait.
Thanks to writer-director Mick Davis, the film, like its subject, dies young.
It's hard to take this oddball movie seriously, right down to the undisguised streetwise-American accent of Andy Garcia as the Italian Jew Amedeo Modigliani.
The best and maybe the only use to be made of the catastrophic screen biography Modigliani is to serve as a textbook outline of how not to film the life of a legendary artist.
Sadly, instead of situating the l'amour fou in the artistic ferment of the period (1917-1920), Davis twists the period to fit the story.
Instead of trying to provide insight into this genius's debilitating madness, Davis prefers to wallow in incoherent and clichéd misery, punctuated by poetically oblique imagery.
Just another artistic sacrifice to life's ironies, cruelties, and bad filmmakers.
...drenched in atmosphere and beautifully composed...but not particularly moving or absorbing.
Be prepared to get out the hankies.
Fundamentally crippled by the casting of Andy Garcia in the kind of leading role that demands someone with a more volcanic, larger-than-life presence to fill it.
No one expected a documentary, but serious art-history students may feel let down.
The real-life Modigliani did indeed live a short, tragic life, but this factually inaccurate, plodding film makes it feel twice as long.
It ain't pretty but you have a choisa: See Modigliani or rent Derek Jarman's Caravaggio instead.
Director Mick Davis shows little if any imagination in presenting the troubled genius or the remarkable Montparnasse art scene of the World War I era, and that's the real bummer.
Mick Davis' prosaic art biopic Modigliani is a tiresome, hammy and ultimately annoying portrait of the artist as a young drunk.
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