GAMES: GameSpot | GameFAQs MUSIC: Last.fm | MP3.com MOVIES: Metacritic | Movietome TV: TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games TV

DVD and Video

Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 



 

Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Factory Girl
The Weinstein Company

Factory Girl reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 45 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
6.1 out of 10
based on 27 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 20 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for pervasive drug use, strong sexual content, nudity and language

Starring Guy Pearce, Sienna Miller, Hayden Christensen, Jimmy Fallon, Meredith Ostrom, and Beth Grant

Factory Girl imaginatively unfolds the comet-like rise and fall of 60s "it girl" Edie Sedgwick (Miller), the blazing superstar who came to define both the glamour and the tragedy of our celebrity-obsessed culture. (The Weinstein Company)


GENRE(S): Drama  
WRITTEN BY: Aaron Richard Golub
Captain Mauzner (also story)
Simon Monjack (story)
 
DIRECTED BY: George Hickenlooper  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: July 17, 2007 
Theatrical: December 29, 2006 
RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: USA 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

75
New York Post Kyle Smith
Miller is wincingly good at playing up the innocence.
Read Full Review
75
San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
This is a movie about power, and its spectacle is that of a woman losing all of it.
Read Full Review
75
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
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.
Read Full Review
70
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
If the filmmaking is in some ways awkward and elementary, Hickenlooper's attitude toward his subject is more complex, and more admirable.
Read Full Review
67
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
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.
Read Full Review
63
USA Today Claudia Puig
If not for Sienna Miller's engaging portrayal of Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl would have little to offer.
Read Full Review
63
New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
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.
Read Full Review
63
Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
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.
Read Full Review
60
Empire Staff (Not credited)
A brave bid to recreate a modern American tragedy, with a revelatory turn by its lead actress.
Read Full Review
60
The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden
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.
Read Full Review
58
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Factory Girl lives fast and dies young, but the corpse it leaves isn't really all that good-looking.
Read Full Review
50
The New Yorker David Denby
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.
Read Full Review
50
Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
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.
Read Full Review
50
Variety Robert Koehler
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.
Read Full Review
50
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Despite, or perhaps because of, a flurry of 11th-hour recutting and reshoots -- the film feels rushed and unfocused.
Read Full Review
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.
Read Full Review
50
ReelViews James Berardinelli
The movie ends up feeling superficial and mechanical. Warhol is a cut-and-dried villain rather than a complex individual.
Read Full Review
50
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
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.
Read Full Review
42
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
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.
Read Full Review
40
New York Magazine David Edelstein
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.
Read Full Review
40
Washington Post Desson Thomson
We find ourselves wondering about the real story, not this version.
Read Full Review
38
Boston Globe Ty Burr
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.
Read Full Review
30
The New York Times Stephen Holden
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.
Read Full Review
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.
Read Full Review
30
Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust
It's more like "That Girl" on speed than anything else.
Read Full Review
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.
Read Full Review
25
The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
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.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 6.1 (out of 10) based on 20 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Peer P. gave it an8:
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

Mark K. gave it a7:
Disappointing. Another movie where the main character is lured into a glitzy underworld, only to regret it and try to escape. Ho, hum. The saving grace is the beauty Sienna Miller, but she could only do so much.

Rick S. gave it a2:
Edie is such a wretched and vapid human being, this mind numbing biopic makes me loathe this pop art culture even more. It's a shame to waste Guy Pearce's solid portrayal of Andy Warhol.

[Anonymous] gave it a10:
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.

Scott A. gave it a9:
I saw this movie a month ago and loved it. Im surprised to see all of the negative reviews. If you liked The Doors and Wonderland than will like this movie. Maybe I'm just a sucker for movies that involve drugs, sex, greed, vanity, fame, power, envy and jealousy.

Enrique gave it an8:
A good biopic.

Blanco A. gave it an8:
What a heartbreaking film. Sienna Miller is breathtaking in this piece... I don't think I'll be able to get her performance out of my head for days.

Read more user comments...

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

Popular on CBS sites: iPhone 3G | Fantasy Football | Moneywatch | Antivirus Software | Recipes | E3 2009

About CBS Interactive | Jobs | Advertise

© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use