Dalíland

Squabbling scenes between Kingsley and Sukowa make the enterprise worthwhile, but there are too many exchanges that attempt to shoehorn in backstory and context and even more fudges, most notably around Dalí’s sexual proclivities.

The great missed opportunity of this film, with its glossy, handsome design and cinematography, and its genteel orchestral score, is how polite and unadventurous it is – something that could never be said of Dalí himself.

Dalíland has its moments, but too often, it’s as saggy as a Camembert timepiece.

[Kingsley] consistently highlights the movie’s inadequacies via his own incomparable abilities.

[A] run-of-the-mill drama... with a level of unoriginality that would surely have appalled Dalí as much as spinach.

You won’t learn much about Dali’s work but Kingsley and Sukowa seize the chance to exploit the couple’s flair for theatricality in all its forms.

I would recommend it, but I don’t think it’ll win Oscars… except for maybe Ben Kingsley

Helmed by an otherwise highly inventive director [...] it turned out to be less than the sum of its parts, lacking a developed script and coherent directorial vision, dragging on to its inevitable demise — drowned in a patchwork of trivia.

An impressive cast, good direction, and eye-catching set design don’t quite make up for a superficial script. Fans of Salvador Dalí’s art will find a few surprises in the film but not a great deal of insight.

The film falls foul of the first law of movie bacchanals: the harder a film-maker insists on the enjoyability of a party, the less enjoyable it seems. But Kingsley mesmerises as the grandiloquent, hollow narcissist at the centre of the swirl...