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75Little Ashes is absorbing but not compelling. Most of its action is inward.
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Ashes makes no claims to be an entirely accurate biopic; it's a speculative, impressionistic portrait without a lot of dramatic force or psychological depth. But it's an elegantly designed film that fascinates as often as it frustrates.
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63The Spanish actress Marina Gatell is exotic and engaging as a young writer drawn to Lorca and puzzled why he is not drawn to her in return.
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50Little Ashes succumbs to the dreaded Masterpiece Theater syndrome as a talky historical drama weighed down by self-importance.
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50Director Paul Morrison ("Wondrous Oblivion") nicely re-creates the period, but puts too much weight on the sexual relationship as determining the men's artistic courses.
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50If you'd like to know about the famously eccentric psyche of surrealist artist Salvador Dali, whom Pattinson plays, you're better off consulting written biographies. Little Ashes does nothing to illuminate the iconic Spanish artist.
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50Anyone interested in hearing the artist's heart-to-hearts properly translated is encouraged to seek out Leonard Cohen's flamenco serenade, "Take This Waltz."
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50The movie could use less romantic boo-hoo-hoo and more Bunuel: It's engaging whenever Bunuel acts as ringleader or troublemaker, even when he's blustery and piggish.
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50A typically bombastic lives-of-the-artists production made even more stilted by having all the actors (including the Spanish ones) speak accented English.
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A trifling historical fantasy, gossip wrapped in gossamer, beautiful to watch but it takes only a light wind to leave the story in tatters.
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50A painfully sincere study in creative passion, sexual ardor and political zeal that embalms a mad and exuberant historical moment within the talky, balky conventions of period-costumed highbrow soap opera.
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50Beltrn, for his part, makes a solidly believable Garca Lorca. The problem is with the man with whom he's obsessed. In Pattinson's performance, we never see what Garca Lorca sees in Dal.
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42I can't imagine what Dali or Buñuel would have made of such bourgeois sentimentality.
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42The film's biggest problem, beyond the overheated melodrama and paper-thin period trappings, is that the trio's fictionalized dalliances diminish their real art.
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40The story and performances (save for Matthew McNulty's angry Luis Buñuel) are paint-by-numbers, with social upheaval and sexual adventurism as dramatic as an after-dinner mint.
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40For much of its running time, Little Ashes wavers between the polite, stuffy style of a "Masterpiece Theater" production and the more pointed agenda of gay indie cinema, with real Spanish locations classing up the otherwise low-budget affair. Acting is stagy and hindered by thick Spanish accents.
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38The problem is that both Philippa Goslett's script and Paul Morrison's direction lack the stylistic craziness - the sense of real, lunatic danger - a project like this desperately needs.
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30The revelation of Little Ashes turns out to be none of the leading men but rather Gatell, a riveting actress cast as the girlfriend who is mystified by Lorca's lack of sexual interest in her.
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30Director Paul Morrison forfeits any meaningful statement about art for a pedestrian coming-out story, based in part on Dali's unreliable, self-aggrandizing memoirs.
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25An exceedingly silly historical fantasy.
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