Frida

The screenplay takes a paint-by-numbers approach, but the director, Julie Taymor... supplies visual exuberance in the spirit of the film’s heroine.

A little better than the run-of-the-mill artist picture, probably because the colorful lives of these figures have an interest that for many people exceeds the interest of their work–or at least enhances it...

Smart, willful, and perverse, this Frida is nobody's servant, and the tiny Hayek plays her with head held high. You may want to laugh now and then, but you won't look away.

Salma Hayek finally ushered her dream project into production, but her impassioned lead performance lacks the necessary gravitas for the role, mistaking empty energy for wild fits of inspiration.

The plodding, glumly literal screenplay holds this otherwise expressive biopic back, but it's still a colourful and entertaining watch.

It wasn't a bad idea to conceive of the film as an epic, complex love story between Frida and Rivera, but the passion between them is more rhetorical than palpable...Taymor and Hayak give us only the rough sketch of a wild soul.

Taymors film doesnt shy away from Fridas struggles and her fierce determination to continue despite them. But it also delves into the real spirit of a painter, and the politics that turn the tides of culture.

The strangest of birds - a film about a Communist, bisexual, hirsute, maverick artist aimed squarely at a mainstream audience - Frida may, in fact, turn out to be more radical than it first appears.

One can imagine Taymor's glorious vision as a triumph of which Frida herself would approve.

a pity that the project paints by the numbers so much