Frida (2002) Critic Reviews

Sometimes we feel as if the film careens from one colorful event to another without respite, but sometimes it must have seemed to Frida Kahlo as if her life did, too.Read the full review

Salma Hayek makes the character an icon of female independence, courage and nonconformity, forecasting special appeal for women viewers.Read the full review

Endlessly interesting. It's about people who thought ideas and art mattered, which makes it a rarity today.Read the full review

At its best when it forsakes earnest psychological exposition for magic realism, when, instead of trying to explain Kahlo's life, it conjures the moods and sensations that fed her art.Read the full review

If you want rich folk-art colors, brainy spectacle, and breezy soap opera, then Frida is the biopic for you.Read the full review

It's too bad that this long-awaited movie didn't go further than faithfully re-creating Kahlo's artwork and her studied look. Her passionate and tragically short life (she died at 47) is ideal Hollywood material, but the audience is left wanting a more in-depth portrait.Read the full review

Disappointing.Read the full review

Save for two spectacularly impressionistic sequences, Taymor brings little of that imagination to Frida, a turgid and conventional biopic that skips through the major incidents in Kahlo's life without giving them any special resonance, or even much visual panache.Read the full review

Ultimately, the movie's biggest crime is its inability to convey the delicate, damaged texture of Kahlo's life, but also the triumph of her will over intimidating defeat.Read the full review