Metacritic reviews

Halle Berry’s latest vehicle is old-fashioned as a leisure suit, but better-looking and a lot more fun.

This movie, with its flashbacks to past sins and traumas, rests squarely on Berry, a mesmerizer who makes every moment count.

It's occasionally imaginative, and, most importantly, never boring.

It’s not just Frankie who is putting on a show here. Berry is also overemphatically showing off her chops.

It's just a matter of time, flashbacks, many costume and accent changes, some more jazz, and a triggering tune on the radio before the truth can set Frankie, and the audience, free.

A soapy period piece that hits all the usual mileposts in filmed versions of such stories.

It’s all too much. Frankie & Alice has multiple problems it can’t get past.

Berry's florid physicality has a certain silent-melodrama pull. The film around her, however, is lamentably by-the-numbers.

A cringe-inducing mess.

Frankie & Alice gives her the rare opportunity to play a film’s hero and its villain inside the same body, and she does a memorably dreadful job in both capacities. That trainwreck fascination is about the only redeeming facet of a prestige picture gone terribly, though not entertainingly, awry.