David Dison

Bradley Cooper channels a great artist who is honest about his flaws of egoism and social pretension but whose artistic integrity and mastery is untrammeled. A commendable performance by him and Carey Mulligan. The transition from black and white to colour is seamless. Biopics are notoriously complex. Cooper visibly struggles with this complexity as a first-time director, rendering the work somewhat laden with vignettes, this being the only significant flaw in the picture.