Klimt

Based very loosely on painter Gustav Klimt's final two decades, Raoul Ruiz's absurdly overwrought phantasmagoria tries to recast the notorious Viennese artist's life as a kind of Divine Comedy: Inferno. And in case you don't pick up on that, Klimt, played by a mercifully restrained John Malkovich, is seen reading Dante in a Viennese coffeehouse midway through the film. It's that kind of movie.

Klimt's Virgil — the guide who ferries him through the turn-of-the-century hell that is pre-WWI Europe's art world — is a mysterious figure (Stephen Dillane) who introduces himself to Klimt at the 1900 Paris Exhibition as the third secretary to the min...