Mapplethorpe
Samuel Goldwyn Films | Release Date: March 1, 2019 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
44
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 20 Critic Reviews
Positive:
6
Mixed:
7
Negative:
7
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
38
RogerEbert.comNick AllenMar 1, 2019
A stunningly drab take on the life and legacy of a photographer who merged pornography with grace, Mapplethorpe doesn’t have an artistic signature of its own, so much as a name it doesn’t live up to. Read full review
38
Slant MagazineRichard Scott LarsonFeb 24, 2019
In Mapplethorpe, the ultimate purpose of the film seems to be the reductive portrayal of the artist as yet another tormented queer destroyed by his tendencies toward vice. Read full review
37
Washington PostMark JenkinsMar 13, 2019
If the new biopic Mapplethorpe presents this transgressive vision is vivid detail — and it does — that’s only because it includes so many of Mapplethorpe’s pictures. Everything else in the film is timid and pedestrian. Read full review
33
IndieWireDavid EhrlichApr 27, 2018
This runaway train of a biopic renders an iconoclast in the most generic of terms, straining Mapplethorpe’s brief life into a series of bullet-points that feed into each other with all the drama of a Wikipedia page, and a fraction of the context. Read full review
30
The New York TimesGlenn KennyFeb 28, 2019
Mapplethorpe, directed by Ondi Timoner, is a fictionalized biography of the photographer that is most alive when it’s putting its subject’s pictures on the screen, which it does often. And should have done more, because the movie is otherwise as timid as its subject was bold. Read full review
25
Boston GlobeTy BurrMar 6, 2019
Maybe if Mapplethorpe hadn’t been commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, it would have been a batter movie. As it is, this sour, undernourished biopic is a disappointment just shy of a disaster — a portrait of a boundary-destroying artist that stays well within the safe borders of convention. Read full review
25
ObserverRex ReedFeb 28, 2019
For a subject of so much titillating eroticism, the script (co-authored by the director and Mikko Alanne) is as dull as navel lint, the lighting is like an undeveloped hospital X-ray and the director has no idea how to move actors around in frame to make them feel like anything more than talking corpses. Read full review
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