David Muir

Stilted, badly acted and poorly written. It entirely lacks the joie de morte that the original had.

Facile, wypipo view of gallant negros overcoming any number of obstacles, set to spontaneous outbursts of negro spirituals essential to any wypipo movie about the civil rights movement. Ignores any depth and fails entirely to explore complexity. Civil rights as yet another Disney production.

Absolutely tedious - the (rather thin) premise has worn thin after 3 episodes, thanks to predictable dialog and poor acting and very few funny jokes.

Good movie but even more historically inaccurate than Shakespeare.

It is quite an achievement to make Mapplethorpe so bland, and so boring. The movie completely misses his manic nature - his ambition so overwhelming that he was, in fact, consumed by it. This is an enervated, lackluster character and the whole show reads more like linked powerpoints than a coherent story. The failure to ever show Mapplethorpe naked -or rather to show Matt Smith naked - was quite frankly cowardly and lends a hypocritical taint to the whole enterprise, making the man himself seem timid and conventional in a world where he demands that everyone else behave outrageously. The real documentary on Netflix is far better, far more informative and far more moving than this tepid attempt to tell his story.