Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

This British biographical drama probes the life of painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992), critically acclaimed as the outstanding British painter of the latter half of the 20th Century. This unsympathetic portrait of Bacon (Derek Jacobi) begins when George Dyer (Daniel Craig), a small-time criminal from ...more

The life of Francis Bacon may have been too vast, turbulent, and dark to be made into a film, but this sketch of a brief period of his life encounters its own problems. The film's limitations are two-fold: there are no finished Bacon paintings on view (presumably, rights were too expensive or difficult to obtain), and Bacon is not going to come off well, given the outcome of this episode, an affair with burglar George Dyer. What director John Maybury and his colleagues try to accomplish is a ...more