| 75 |
New York Post
Miller is wincingly good at playing up the innocence.
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| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
This is a movie about power, and its spectacle is that of a woman losing all of it.
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| 75 |
Baltimore Sun
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.
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| 70 |
Salon.com
If the filmmaking is in some ways awkward and elementary, Hickenlooper's attitude toward his subject is more complex, and more admirable.
|
| 67 |
Entertainment Weekly
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.
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| 63 |
USA Today
If not for Sienna Miller's engaging portrayal of Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl would have little to offer.
|
| 63 |
New York Daily News
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.
|
| 63 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
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.
|
| 60 |
Empire
Staff (Not credited)
A brave bid to recreate a modern American tragedy, with a revelatory turn by its lead actress.
|
| 60 |
The Hollywood Reporter
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.
|
| 58 |
Portland Oregonian
Factory Girl lives fast and dies young, but the corpse it leaves isn't really all that good-looking.
|
| 50 |
The New Yorker
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.
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| 50 |
Chicago Reader
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.
|
| 50 |
Variety
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.
|
| 50 |
TV Guide
Despite, or perhaps because of, a flurry of 11th-hour recutting and reshoots -- the film feels rushed and unfocused.
|
| 50 |
Slate
Dana Stevens
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.
|
| 50 |
ReelViews
The movie ends up feeling superficial and mechanical. Warhol is a cut-and-dried villain rather than a complex individual.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Tribune
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.
|
| 42 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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.
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| 40 |
New York Magazine
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.
|
| 40 |
Washington Post
We find ourselves wondering about the real story, not this version.
|
| 38 |
Boston Globe
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.
|
| 30 |
The New York Times
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.
|
| 30 |
LA Weekly
David Ehrenstein
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.
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| 30 |
Los Angeles Times
It's more like "That Girl" on speed than anything else.
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| 30 |
Village Voice
Nathan Lee
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.
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| 25 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
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.
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