Artivels Undescribable Perfection

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

JKlein9823 This is very much a downer of a movie. This is not an LGBT-themed movie for anyone expecting a good time. Both Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig give good performances, and the film has good production values. But ... this is a dreary, dull and plodding film. Daniel Craig took quite a risk portraying the self-destructive and amoral lover. From seeing him in this, one would never guess that he would be the next actor to portray James Bond in "Casino Royale" in 2006. An art house type of movie that is definitely not for everyone's taste.

paulijcalderon This is great visually, but the story doesn't hold up as well as the visual style. I am not very familiar with the real life story of the painter that this movie is based on, but I never really got a sense of who he really was. Which is a shame because it feels like you are supposed to understand him and his art. What makes the movie work is the nightmarish tone throughout.There are some strange and frightening images which are worth a look. You could say this movie is a bit experimental. But, again, the main character did unfortunately not work too well for me. He felt rude and selfish and his inner monologues felt like a different character in my opinion. In the end it seemed like the secondary character was the more sympathetic one. I don't know if that was the point, but I'm sure the painter had an interesting life. This is just not the movie to showcase it. Don't get me wrong, it's not the actors fault. They do a good job with what they are given.There are some interesting things here. Colors are great and some locations feel claustrophobic, which help give the sense that you can't escape this dream. I just wish the main character could be more like-able and that it had a story you could get more invested in. Watching it is still surreal, dark and will take you on a unique dream like experience.So, the visual outshine the characters in my opinion. It is worth watching for the nightmare/dream scenes. Everything to do with that reminds me of something out of a David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick film. Hey, maybe the main character will work better for you. Maybe this movie could grow on you over time, it feels like it's one of those type of films that need a bit of time digest.

secondtake Love is the Devil (1998)Francis Bacon (along with Lucien Freud) is one of a handful of British painters of note in the last century. That's not very many. And he's inflated here beyond his very idiosyncratic and repetitive works. They're powerful paintings, no question, and filled with psychological drama as well as painterly angst. They come from a time when representative and expressive paintings was out of favor, and so he's a rebel, too. But this isn't about Bacon the successful artist, and it doesn't address his work directly (the filmmakers couldn't get his cooperation so none of his work is shown). What it does do is show the man, as seen through actor Derek Jacobi, who plays a kind of deadpan and slightly boring character a little too well. We are, I think supposed to find the artist through his mentality, which is played out here by showing his social and sexual lives in all kinds of diversity.But there is another goal to the movie, to me: creating an interesting contemporary world of artists and social renegades. That is, the art world of London (etc.) in roughly the 1970s or 80s. The filmmaker John Maybury is a close associate of Derek Jarman, who was an openly gay filmmaker known for personally quirky films that dealt with issues that mattered to him, including his odd and intriguing "Caravaggio." Maybury, unlike Jarman, has no history of great indie films, and this one is just structurally awkward, and in filmmaking terms it seems a little novice, whatever the good intentions.So it might actually fail on several levels. One is the most damning--that it doesn't actually illuminate the paintings. I found the personal life and the heightened story distracting, even if it has a basis in truth (and is the driving line of the movie). It also doesn't quite work on the simple level of convincing acting, even though Jacobi looks enough like Bacon to make that fly, and his counterpart played by Daniel Craig is decent (we don't dare expect more from Craig, do we?). And then the movie wobbles visually, both with camera-work that is either clumsy or affected (or both) and with editing that seems clunky. That is, this is a movie almost "thrown together."Which I'm sure it was not. Maybury is trying to mainstream his life (unlike Jarman, who enjoyed being an Indie star), and his collaborations with the likes of Keira Knightley are revealing for both (one as a way of going serious, the other for a way of going commercial). I know there are those who accept and love a movie like this because of its flaws, which only enhance somehow it's integrity and its artistry. But that's only one way to look at it, and if you like offbeat movies that are also brilliant deep down, you might not find that here.

niddy7 I'll admit it. I rented this film to explore the past works of Daniel Craig. He's great in it and so is the legendary Derek Jacobi. The movie itself is presented in what I'm assuming is the same vein as Francis Bacon's works. There are lots of dramatic flashes of what are supposed to be disturbing imagery, etc. However, these effects take away from the story of what happened between these two people. Instead these two great actors are forced to tell a story as best they can in "moments". This movie did spur me to do some light research into Francis Bacon, which helped me fill in the story. Knowing more about what happened gave the performances more meaning but I think it could have been better. Still, full frontal nudity from Daniel Craig made it more than worth the price of admission. License to thrill: confirmed.