Critic Reviews

Miller is wincingly good at playing up the innocence.

This is a movie about power, and its spectacle is that of a woman losing all of it.

Pearce makes you see why Edie found Warhol as irresistible as he found her. His otherworldly eyes focus on both who she is and what she represents. He sees her as a star.

If the filmmaking is in some ways awkward and elementary, Hickenlooper's attitude toward his subject is more complex, and more admirable.

As Factory Girl more than acknowledges, Edie Sedgwick's downward spiral was ultimately her own doing. Yet even as the film captures the silk-screen outline of her rise and fall, it never quite colors in who she was.

If not for Sienna Miller's engaging portrayal of Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl would have little to offer.

Miller and Pearce are admirably determined to do their complex characters justice, but the generic script turns them into enigmatic symbols, locked in a hollow time capsule.

For Hickenlooper and Mauzner, Sedgwick is more interesting for whom she slept with than who she was. Their movie may indict Warhol for exploiting Sedgwick, but they're just as guilty.

Director George Hickenlooper captures the energy and ultra-irony of Warhol's scene, but his attempts to give the film a conventional biopic arc end up wallowing in dime-store psychology.

A brave bid to recreate a modern American tragedy, with a revelatory turn by its lead actress.