Surviving Picasso

Freed from the slavishness of most authorized biography, the film makers try bold strokes.

Surviving Picasso is always intelligent and often entertaining, even when it perhaps inevitably takes on the character of an upmarket wax museum. [4 Oct 1996]

Surviving Picasso is quite well made and easy enough to watch, but it's not noticeably challenging or involving.

The movie breaks down into anecdotes that don't flow or build, and everything is narrated by the Gilot character.

This movie is a dreary endurance test.

Producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala bring the customary polish, but no pizzazz, to this simplistic portrait of the artist as a dirty old man.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Surviving Picasso is merely the worst movie ever made about a painter; worse movies have been made on other subjects, though none comes immediately to mind. [20 Sep 1996]