Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Roedy Green Being John Malkovich was one of, if not the, strangest movies I have ever seen. Klimt is similarly strange, but not quite that strange. Like Russell Crowe's John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, Klimt hallucinates people, and in a similar way, you, in the audience are just as confused about who is real and who is imaginary. You are only gradually let in on understanding this.The movie is decorated with dozens of naked women who mainly parade about, or who try to seduce Klimt. Given that he is not particularly handsome, charming or intelligent, I failed to see the attraction. Perhaps it was just his fame as a painter.The interiors and costumes are opulent turn of the century Vienna. Elaborate Viennese pastries tempt the eye. The sets are the main appeal of the movie.There is a lot of cat and mouse dialogue where the characters reveal nothing and say nothing while attempting to sound profound. It is all quite frustrating.Nikolai Kinski plays the homosexual painter Egon Schiele in an exaggeratedly swish way, reminiscent of Da'an's hand gestures in Earth Final Conflict.The costumes and hair treatments are so elaborate, that I could not for the life of me tell the female characters apart. Is this a new character or an old one in a new do? The characters all behave the same way and look similar. I didn't develop any bond with any of the characters because I could not even tell them apart.

sslingland I get it. It's a cinematic version of a 12-tone piece of music. You can enjoy the sounds, but unless you're privy to the artist's contrived intentions, it's a gobbledy-gook mess. Not the worst movie I've ever seen - the costuming and scenery/sets are lovely. I was really hoping I could enjoy the film DESPITE John Malkovich; really the only film I like the man in is Being JM because it pokes fun at his ridiculous persona that pervades every character he portrays.The only reason I kept watching was the hope of being thrown a lifesaver of a shred of a story. I will agree that Kinski and the exotic women of the movie are the brightest spots. I wished the movie had been "Schiele" and revolved more around Kinski. JM as Klimt is about as bland as stale toast.

sprengerguido One thing I love about this film is that users either love it or hate it - there's hardly any middle ground. That response corresponds very much to the way the film plays out. It acts as if it was a biopic, but in fact it is only one type of film, a Raoul Ruiz movie. Ruiz takes up an idea and explores it, visually and intellectually. Then he reverses it. He explores the relation between the idea and its opposite. Then he takes that relation and looks at its reversal... and so on: there's always order, but it's always tangled. It's cerebral, but also surreal, and playful. The film is, among others about looking at movies and looking at paintings. Is art a functional depiction of the world, as one character holds - does it work like a mirror? People who criticize this film for not being historically accurate seem to think so - implying that they don't like Klimt, as his paintings were not particularly realistic either. Or is art like the other side of a coin, a complementary reality to the one we experience daily? This is one central question of this film that shows a lot of mirrors and coins. In a painting or a movie, a mirror image looks just as real as a filmed or painted object. Ruiz follows up on this observation. That is why there are so many doubles in the film. Klimt never knows if the woman he desires most is the original or a double. What does that mean for his feelings? He also meets his own double, and beats him up. Then there are coins to denote oppositions. When he first visits that woman, a servant flips a coin, and Klimt meets her in front of mirrors. On another visit, another servant flips a coin, and this time Klimt steps beyond the mirror. The doublings and imaginations seem to increase exponentially in this film. You can look at yourself and you can be looked at. Klimt glances into a microscope and asks: "This is me?" He visits a brothel where all the girls wear mustaches and enters a cage with a Gorilla mask on - the man who creates high-brow spectacles turns himself into a low-brow entertainment. Yes, it makes sense, and yes, it's hilarious. Not many period biopics make you laugh that much. This is also something not too many people seem to notice: This film is funny. Fun is when opposites crash into each other, and Ruiz knows that. I really enjoyed this one.

will white The first things that bothered me about this movie, though I cannot say it was the movie's fault, were the terrible replicas of his work. My god, the paintings shown (and shown in close-up and lengthily) were awful. But I'm sure it's hard and expensive to obtain rights to real reproductions.This was not meant as a biography, I know, it was meant as a representation of the "mind of the artist". Maybe because I'm a painter, because I know painters, because I've read a lot about the lives of painters, but I think most movies concerned with this aspect just present this ridiculous romantic whirlwind of craziness that all great artists after Academia must have been inspired by. These could have been anyone's incoherent deathbed hallucinations, Klimt seemed to be used as a prop whose work was sufficiently bright and unconventional for its time to make the forced discombobulation at all believable.Films like this make me hesitant to ever see another film about artists. I would say this was as bad as Modigliani, if in different ways. If they removed the Klimt aspect from "Klimt", and it was simply a movie about a dying man's obscured memories being relayed to a friend, it would be mediocre, but fine.