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80Freed from the slavishness of most authorized biography, the film makers try bold strokes.
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75Surviving Picasso is an intelligent, beautifully crafted and engrossing Ismail Merchant-James Ivory biographical portrait of the century's most famous and successful painter. [4 Oct 1996]
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75An absorbing look at emotional tyranny, with a great screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
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75Obviously armed with more gangster-of-love opportunities playing Pablo Picasso than he had playing Richard Nixon, Anthony Hopkins ends up opting here for wit over full-blooded passion, but it proves to be enough. [23 Sep 1996]
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75Surviving Picasso is always intelligent and often entertaining, even when it perhaps inevitably takes on the character of an upmarket wax museum. [4 Oct 1996]
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75Cool, assured, emotionally remote, Merchant Ivory's Surviving Picasso is never less than watchable, but it's also a cinematic paradox, a movie that works to capture Picasso from every angle yet somehow misses the fire in his belly.
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70Surviving Picasso is quite well made and easy enough to watch, but it's not noticeably challenging or involving.
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70Latest Merchant Ivory production (produced with David Wolper) is a winner in spite of relatively modern look to the film.
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67Hopkins' Picasso is a first-rate performance.... With his intense stare, his air of subtle lechery, and his life-devouring zest, he not only looks uncannily like the real Picasso, he was actually able to convince me that he was Picasso. [4 Oct 1996]
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63The movie breaks down into anecdotes that don't flow or build, and everything is narrated by the Gilot character.
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50A big, silly movie about the famed goatish painter that stars the nearly perfect Anthony Hopkins.
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50This movie is a dreary endurance test.
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50Not a movie that needs to exist, but it passes the time, and at least Hopkins manages to look like Picasso at odd moments.
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Surviving Picasso is tasteful, more expensive-looking than it really is, and not nearly as lengthy as it feels. [18 Oct 1996]
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Surviving Picasso falters in its careless structure.
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40Producer 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.
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25Surviving Picasso is flat-out dull, hanging like a K Mart print in a suburban mall - a testament to Merchant-Ivory's blew-it period. [20 Sep 1996]
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20Not 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]