Flashily but irritatingly shot, full of unmotivated switches from colour to b/w, sudden flashbacks, mannered slow mo and jump cuts, this is hardly a subtle evocation of its subject's life.
Comment
02/09/06
Piņero (2001)
43
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:61
Fresh:26
Rotten:35
Average Rating:5.4/10
Consensus: Though Bratt is great in the title role, the biopic itself is messy and Piņero grows tiresome.
Theatrical Release:Dec 14, 2001 Limited
Box Office: $198,291
Synopsis: Miguel Piņero was a New York City poet and playwright who wrote what he knew: a world of "stabbing, shooting and dying." This gritty, non-linear biographical film presents Piņero's dark charisma... [More]
Starring: Benjamin Bratt, Talisa Soto, Mandy Patinkin, Rita Moreno
Director: Leon Ichaso
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Reviews for Piņero
God is jealous of Benjamin Bratt, but He's coming around Bratt's performance [here] is electrifying and charismatic.
04/18/02
Overlapping the artist's biography and his work, writer-director Leon Ichaso pointedly reflects the chaos in his subject's shortish life, but he links the artist's frustrations and talent in the usual manner: as cause and effect.
07/31/07
Top CriticYou get the feeling Ichaso is trying to bluff us into becoming believers.
12/14/01
Top CriticSeems like it's scrawled in blank verse on the back of a greasy paper bag -- and that's a compliment.
01/25/02
Too scattered and problem-riddled to ever do its subject justice.
01/06/02
Never comes close to convincing us that this guy is worth a movie at all.
03/14/02
Biopics about inebriated artists are always stranded by their own non-stories, and Piņero's short life was apparently little more than a series of dimebag mooches and public stumbles.
12/11/01
Top CriticBratt ... takes a giant step forward in terms of credibility.
03/22/02
What makes the film so grueling and, eventually, tiresome is the relentlessness of the guy's self-destruction.
03/15/02
Who'd have thought Benjamin Bratt could give such an impassioned, stormy, totally absorbing performance that he would leave you gaping in astonishment and admiration?
12/24/01
Director Leon Ichaso circles around the life and the work of Piņero with an intensity that matches the Puerto Rican-born artist's creativity.
12/16/01
It's impressionistic and risks incoherence, but it works as a successful montage of the unruly life of a sensitive, talented, but conflicted man whose self-destructiveness it never tries to sugarcoat or deny.
03/22/02
Top CriticPinero is a disingenuous huck about a disingenuous huckster.
02/20/02
An artistic nightmare, marred by numerous stylistic leaps.
10/02/02
Bratt's fast-talking, all-attitude interpretation is showboating without soul--which can be said of the entire movie.
01/03/02
Offers a highly impressionistic portrait of this self-described 'junkie Christ,' played with riveting intensity by Benjamin Bratt.
12/13/01
For all the film's spectacle, its visual flash and approximation of street 'realism,' its most daring aspect is its willingness to represent Piņero as a vicious, frightened thug.
01/25/02
Worth seeing for Benjamin Bratt's performance.
12/22/01
Top CriticThe film's rhythm is so deftly crude it unwinds like an underground 80s cinematic relic.
12/07/01
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