Factory Girl 2006

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: It's a sad, haunting story -- but George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl does little to show us why we should care. Read more

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune: Hickenlooper likes to observe chaos and artistic extremes with a friendly eye, and there are hints all through Factory Girl of the shattering film it could have been. But the story falls too easily into 'live fast, die young' laments and postures. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: 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 more

Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: This is juicy stuff, but the filmmakers have absolutely no idea what to do with it. Read more

Nathan Rabin, AV Club: The best Factory Girl can muster is Oliver Stone on a budget, complete with shrill overacting, sloppy pacing, constantly changing film stock, distracting celebrity cameos, messy psychodrama, and bleary stylistic overload. Read more

Bill Muller, Arizona Republic: Director George Hickenlooper incessantly switches between black-and-white, grained-out, color-saturated, handheld and fuzzy shots. He's not so much making a movie as an audition tape for the cameraman's guild. Read more

Ty Burr, 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. Read more

Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times: A brisk, superficial treatment of the tragic supernova life of Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl disappoints as both biography and drama. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: Sienna Miller remains an actress in search of a movie worthy of her talent. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Not everyone is crushed by fame, but almost everyone is flattened by it. Read more

Bruce Westbrook, Houston Chronicle: When Sedgwick's whirl of liberation turns into addiction, cliches stall the plot. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: Thanks to the flashy work of the film's two editors and cinematographer, style trumps substance. Or perhaps it merely masks the lack of it. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Sienna Miller, with her glossed and dimpled party-girl smile, looks so much like the actual Edie Sedgwick that you may think, at moments, that you're seeing the real thing. That spooky look-alike allure does a lot for the movie. Read more

Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press: Sedgwick's death seems as predestined as a Hollywood melodrama. Read more

David Ehrenstein, L.A. Weekly: 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 more

Gene Seymour, Newsday: Edie Sedgwick may have been too elusive and too fractured to be easily explained. Factory Girl is a good try with some great acting. But as with its subject, it's both too much and not enough. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: Why should we care about Edie Sedgwick? Factory Girl, fatally, can't find a reason. Read more

Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: With Factory Girl, Hickenlooper has taken an icon and made her ordinary. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: Miller is wincingly good at playing up the innocence, with her junior high school declarations ('there's always hope') and the politely vacuous laugh she seems to deliver from her front teeth. Read more

Stephen Holden, New York Times: Factory Girl, a biography of Edie Sedgwick, the most glamorous of Andy Warhol's so-called superstars, suggests a magazine layout masquerading as a film. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: It's a movie without that emotional spark that lets us connect with her, or anybody else. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: The historical Edie Sedgwick was a fascinating figure and at no time was she more interesting than when she was a member of Warhol's Factory. It's too bad Factory Girl fails to make this woman compelling in these circumstances. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com: George Hickenlooper's impressionistic biopic Factory Girl is a strange little affair, and not a wholly successful one. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: Miller gets old and used up before our eyes, and we not only see it, we see what it means to experience it. This is a movie about power, and its spectacle is that of a woman losing all of it. Read more

Dana Stevens, Slate: Whatever substantial qualities it might once have possessed have been wasted, picked over by rumor and gossip, and sullied by the pawing of many hands. Read more

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Read more

Laura Emerick, Chicago Sun-Times: Despite strong performances by Sienna Miller as the quintessential '60s It Girl and Guy Pearce as FrankenArtist Andy, the film ultimately doesn't have much to say about the people it purports to depict or the tumultuous times in which they lived. Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: Less a movie than a montage, the swinging sixties shot in an arc both tiny and trite. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: Tragedy requires us to genuinely care about the character and Factory Girl fails in that regard, despite Miller's emphatic performance. Read more

Trevor Johnston, Time Out: One wonders whether the documentary format would have better served the material than this ill-focused drama. Since real-life family and observers chime in over the end credits, perhaps the filmmakers were thinking the same thing. Read more

Melissa Anderson, Time Out: Factory Girl's greatest crime is transforming a scene and a personality that were all about movement and flamboyant brilliance into nothing but inert ventriloquism. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: If not for Sienna Miller's engaging portrayal of Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl would have little to offer. Read more

Robert Koehler, Variety: Though Sedgwick embodied everything that glittered and grated about the era's counterculture, director George Hickenlooper evinces no deep interest in the time and place, resulting in a film that feels removed from its source. Read more

Nathan Lee, Village Voice: The least-fabulous movie imaginable about the most fabulous persona in that most fabulous of scenes, the Warhol Factory at the height of its genius and gaiety. Read more

Desson Thomson, Washington Post: Factory Girl isn't a penetrating chronicle of Sedgwick's life so much as a production designer's highlights reel. Read more