Frankie & Alice

Halle Berry’s latest vehicle is old-fashioned as a leisure suit, but better-looking and a lot more fun.

It's occasionally imaginative, and, most importantly, never boring.

It’s not just Frankie who is putting on a show here. Berry is also overemphatically showing off her chops.

Berry’s performance, although less campy and histrionic than the trailer makes it look, is still outsize in proportion to the material, which feels slight and insubstantial despite its basis in a true story.

A soapy period piece that hits all the usual mileposts in filmed versions of such stories.

It’s all too much. Frankie & Alice has multiple problems it can’t get past.

Frankie & Alice gives her the rare opportunity to play a film’s hero and its villain inside the same body, and she does a memorably dreadful job in both capacities. That trainwreck fascination is about the only redeeming facet of a prestige picture gone terribly, though not entertainingly, awry.