‘Dalíland’ Review: Ben Kingsley Stars (with an Assist by Ezra Miller) in Mary Harron’s Sly Biopic About the Aging and Embattled Salvador Dalí
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There’s a genre I like so much I can never get enough of it — I call it the Biopic About Someone You Wouldn’t Make a Biopic About.
The form came into existence, in a certain way, with “Sid and Nancy,” but it was all but patented by the screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who planted it on the map, in 1994, with “Ed Wood” (still the “Citizen Kane” of the genre), then went on to script “The People vs.
Larry Flynt,” “Man on the Moon” (about Andy Kaufman), “Big Eyes” (about the painter Walter Keane and his wife, Margaret, who turned out to be the painter behind the throne), and “Dolemite Is My Name” (about the fluky hustler-comedian Ray Moore).
There have been films in the genre from other quarters, like Paul Schrader’s superb “Auto Focus” (about the TV star Bob Crane and his video-fetish sex life), going right up through the recent Toronto Film Festival sensation “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” But there’s one director who has been a giant of this genre, even if people don’t tend to think of her that way.
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