Metascore
45 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 27 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 27
  2. Negative: 6 out of 27
  1. 75
    Miller is wincingly good at playing up the innocence.
  2. This is a movie about power, and its spectacle is that of a woman losing all of it.
  3. 75
    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.
  4. 70
    If the filmmaking is in some ways awkward and elementary, Hickenlooper's attitude toward his subject is more complex, and more admirable.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    63
    If not for Sienna Miller's engaging portrayal of Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl would have little to offer.
  9. 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.
  10. Reviewed by: Staff (Not credited)
    60
    A brave bid to recreate a modern American tragedy, with a revelatory turn by its lead actress.
  11. 58
    Factory Girl lives fast and dies young, but the corpse it leaves isn't really all that good-looking.
  12. It's lively but chaotic and evasive. The period re-creation switches on and off. We get a sense of what the silver-walled Factory was like, but not the rest of swinging Manhattan in the '60s.
  13. 50
    Despite, or perhaps because of, a flurry of 11th-hour recutting and reshoots -- the film feels rushed and unfocused.
  14. 50
    The movie ends up feeling superficial and mechanical. Warhol is a cut-and-dried villain rather than a complex individual.
  15. Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    50
    For a movie about the tumultuous friendships among artists, musicians, and filmmakers during one of the 20th century's periods of creative ferment, Factory Girl is remarkably incurious about cinema, music, and art.
  16. Reviewed by: Robert Koehler
    50
    The wild, unhinged life of Andy Warhol's favorite "superstar," Edie Sedgwick, is refashioned in Factory Girl as a tame biopic with little feel for the 1960s New York Underground.
  17. 50
    It's a peculiar movie, frantic and useless, with a hyperactive camera that gives us no more than fleeting impressions of Edie ecstatic at parties, Edie strung out on drugs, Edie lying mostly naked on a bed, with her skin splotchy from injections.
  18. 50
    The bar for historical accuracy in Hollywood biopics hasn't always been this high -- paradoxically, it's been rising even as the public has become more ignorant of history.
  19. The two central performances are competent but uninspired -- and annoyingly mannered. Pearce's Warhol is a one-note, irresponsible villain and Miller's Sedgwick is a shallow, pretentious party girl who chain-smokes her way through every scene.
  20. It was probably hopeless from the start: The Warhol cosmos is too weird and complicated to lend itself to a conventional Hollywood biopic, and this one is conventional down to Warhol's first glimpse of his future "superstar" bouncing up and down vivaciously in tacky slow motion.
  21. We find ourselves wondering about the real story, not this version.
  22. Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    38
    Factory Girl is not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. It's something worse: an irredeemably banal drama about some of the most protean, contradictory creative forces of the 1960s.
  23. Reviewed by: David Ehrenstein
    30
    Sienna Miller captures much of Edie’s physical manner and some of her voice (though she’s nowhere near deep enough), but there’s nothing she can do with material that requires her to mope and pout for the bulk of her screen time.
  24. Reviewed by: Nathan Lee
    30
    Poor little girl, chewed up in the Factory machinery. It was inevitable, perhaps, that a biopic of the Pop princess would stick to pop psychology, but did it have to feel as flat as a silkscreen? With its hackneyed party scenes and jet-set montages, Factory Girl fails even at frivolity.
  25. 30
    It's more like "That Girl" on speed than anything else.
  26. The kindest thing to be said about this deluxe photo spread of a film is that Sienna Miller's Edie and Guy Pearce's Andy capture their characters' images and body language with relative precision.
  27. 25
    The film strays so far from verisimilitude that it feels more like a big celebrity dress-up party than history brought to life. The profoundly silly Internet favorite series "Yacht Rock" offered a more convincing take on pop-culture history and that was at least going for laughs.
User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 25 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10 out of 15
  2. Negative: 2 out of 15
  1. PeerP.
    8
    Not bad (as it was made out to be), great performances on the part of Sienna Miller (as Edie Sedgwick) and Guy Pearce (as Andy Warhol), the story was poorly adapted and conceived but as a character study (studies) it is great Full Review »
  2. [Anonymous]
    10
    I loved this movie - Sienna Miller and Guy Pearce did fantastic jobs of portraying Edie and Andy - it might not be perfect, but so what??? Perhaps it doesn't portray Andy or Edie completely realistic, so go read some books and see some movies. This is just a glimpse into that world and the actors did fantastically well on their characters at least. Full Review »
  3. This film is so pretentious I can feel Andy Warhol awkwardly turning in his grave. This serious attempt to expose the abuse of love plays like a preschool playground romance. It is shallow and of little value to those who can remember the 60s or the MTV generation. It's appeal is representative of glamour and on the surface is enjoyable as a caricature of history. Despite strong casting the illusion of performance is evidence of style over substance. Hickenlooper exploits the memory of Warhol and Sedgwick and disrespects art in the process. Full Review »