Maya Dardel

A movie that's by turns off-putting, bracingly incisive and insufferable.

The film has much to recommend it, in particular its lack of sentimentality about suicide, art, womanhood.

The red-blooded vivacity of Ms. Olin's performance ... pierces through the muck. She chews feeble lines like meat, spitting out the masticated remains.

Is Maya Dardel serious? The regal Lena Olin plays her with frank ferocity and arrogant certainty, but so much about the grandiose poet borders on parody.

A film that only serves as a reminder that Lena Olin can still deliver a fantastic performance, even if it's buried in a piece of overwritten nonsense.

Olin is so spell-binding...just watching her is treat enough.

That's not a way of saying, "Don't bother with this movie." By all means, bother. Just know that the human munition in the title role is so screen-filling that the actual story is a little flat by comparison.

Whilst it has many problems, Maya Dardel is a fascinating film, if not an enjoyable one.

Maya Dardel is cruel and unusual punishment-I thought that was unconstitutional.

[Its] feminist boldness crosses into the exhilarating. This is an unapologetic dare to accept a woman, with all her genius and all her faults - all her humanity - on full defiant display.

This morbid premise was concocted by a literary pair and it shows with its intellectual inquiry.

One awesome performance, one awful movie.