Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

JKlein9823 This is very much a downer of a movie. This is not an LGBT-themed movie for anyone expecting a good time. Both Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig give good performances, and the film has good production values. But ... this is a dreary, dull and plodding film. Daniel Craig took quite a risk portraying the self-destructive and amoral lover. From seeing him in this, one would never guess that he would be the next actor to portray James Bond in "Casino Royale" in 2006. An art house type of movie that is definitely not for everyone's taste.

valis1949 LOVE IS THE DEVIL (dir. John Maybury) The film concerns the Irish born English figurative painter Francis Bacon, and focuses on his life in the early 1960's when he was one of the central figures in a group of dissipated and debauched intellectuals at the Colony Room, a private drinking club in London's Soho district. Bacon's portrait style during this period is reminiscent of the work of contemporary American artist, Ralph Steadman in that both artists render their subjects in a bloated or garishly distorted manner. And, John Maybury, the director of LOVE IS THE DEVIL conveys this aspect of Bacon's painting style by shooting parts of the film using curious time-lapsed techniques, odd camera angles, and blurred optical abnormalities that really highlight Francis Bacon's cracked artistic vision. Derek Jacobi is note perfect as the dissolute, alcoholic painter, and Daniel Craig is surprisingly convincing as Bacon's thuggish lover, George Dyer. And, Tilda Swinton is positively devastating as Muriel Belcher, the founder and proprietress of the Colony Room. MUST SEE

secondtake Love is the Devil (1998)Francis Bacon (along with Lucien Freud) is one of a handful of British painters of note in the last century. That's not very many. And he's inflated here beyond his very idiosyncratic and repetitive works. They're powerful paintings, no question, and filled with psychological drama as well as painterly angst. They come from a time when representative and expressive paintings was out of favor, and so he's a rebel, too. But this isn't about Bacon the successful artist, and it doesn't address his work directly (the filmmakers couldn't get his cooperation so none of his work is shown). What it does do is show the man, as seen through actor Derek Jacobi, who plays a kind of deadpan and slightly boring character a little too well. We are, I think supposed to find the artist through his mentality, which is played out here by showing his social and sexual lives in all kinds of diversity.But there is another goal to the movie, to me: creating an interesting contemporary world of artists and social renegades. That is, the art world of London (etc.) in roughly the 1970s or 80s. The filmmaker John Maybury is a close associate of Derek Jarman, who was an openly gay filmmaker known for personally quirky films that dealt with issues that mattered to him, including his odd and intriguing "Caravaggio." Maybury, unlike Jarman, has no history of great indie films, and this one is just structurally awkward, and in filmmaking terms it seems a little novice, whatever the good intentions.So it might actually fail on several levels. One is the most damning--that it doesn't actually illuminate the paintings. I found the personal life and the heightened story distracting, even if it has a basis in truth (and is the driving line of the movie). It also doesn't quite work on the simple level of convincing acting, even though Jacobi looks enough like Bacon to make that fly, and his counterpart played by Daniel Craig is decent (we don't dare expect more from Craig, do we?). And then the movie wobbles visually, both with camera-work that is either clumsy or affected (or both) and with editing that seems clunky. That is, this is a movie almost "thrown together."Which I'm sure it was not. Maybury is trying to mainstream his life (unlike Jarman, who enjoyed being an Indie star), and his collaborations with the likes of Keira Knightley are revealing for both (one as a way of going serious, the other for a way of going commercial). I know there are those who accept and love a movie like this because of its flaws, which only enhance somehow it's integrity and its artistry. But that's only one way to look at it, and if you like offbeat movies that are also brilliant deep down, you might not find that here.

Shuggy This film makes "Bent" seem cheerful.It's hard to believe Francis Bacon could have been as hateful and negative as this. Worst was leaving his lover (for want of a better word) George Dyer out in the rain while a sadistic renter had his way with Bacon. Sorry, worst was his flippant remark when Andy Warhol (?) sympathised over Dyer's recent suicide.The story, and apparently the life, lacked the redeeming wit of Joe Orton's, as told in "Prick Up Your Ears". Unlike his close counterpart Kenneth Halliwell, there was no suggestion that Dyer was Bacon's muse or had given him more than visual inspiration. I got to wish - at least in the film - that Dyer had taken to Bacon with a hammer before killing himself, as Halliwell did to Orton.Yes, the film is fragmented and wild, like Bacon's paintings. But is that kind of imitation helpful to understand the painter? We got to see remarkably few actual Bacon paintings, and none of those for which he is famous.Best line: "Champagne for my real friends. Real pain for my sham friends."