Bertrand Bonello, a characteristically unorthodox, visually gifted filmmaker, pays tribute to the life of Yves Saint Laurent in the most nebulous way with Saint Laurent, a stupefying art film starring Gaspard Ulliel as the chain-smoking fashion icon. Unlike last year’s rigid biopic Yves Saint Laurent, Bonello’s picture is more impressionistic and smaller in scale, a disorienting haze of sex, drugs and excess unconcerned with the Saint Laurent’s myriad accomplishments. It’s a film about texture, rubbing and poking its fingers in and around the nooks and crannies of Saint Laurent’s life that the other film brushed over in one fell swoop.

Instead of dramatizing, say, Saint Laurent’s volcanic rise to prominence at Christian Dior (an indisputably defining period which is audaciously given no screen time), the film fastens tightly on moments of little historical significance and flashes of sweaty debauchery that serve as opportunities to observe his behaviors, habits and vices. An emblematic scene sees a stone-cold wasted Saint Laurent sprawled out on his couch, the room a mess of spilt booze and broken glass that leaves his arms bloody. There’s a toppled bottle of his favorite pills, the contents of which are gobbled up by his poor French bulldog, Moujik. The inebriated pooch just happens to be one in a long line of Moujiks; Saint Laurent had a routine of replacing his deceased dogs with new, identical ones. What this says about him is for us to interpret on our own.

The film mostly occupies the period in the 1960s and 1970s that comprised Saint Laurent’s professional heyday. Highlights are his affair with model Jacques De Bascher (Louis Garrel), his relationship with model/designer Loulou de la Falaise (Léa Seydoux), and the unveiling of his 1976 “Russian Ballet and Opera” collection. The “Russian” portion of the film provides the best moment, a breathless, Mondrian-inspired split-screen runway montage that blows everything we saw in Yves Saint Laurent out of the water. (An earlier split-screen montage of runway models contrasted newsreel footage from the turbulent years of 1968 and 1969 is almost as exhilarating.) Seydoux  and Garrel don’t get much to do besides look ridiculously pretty (can’t be mad at that), and they exist almost exclusively on the periphery.

In fact, if you take a step back, you’ll see that everything in this movie—the characters, the locations, even the lines of dialogue—seem to exist on the blurred edges of reality. It’s all fluid; nothing is concrete. There’s no effort made by Bonello to contextualize anything that happens in Saint Laurent save for that newsreel/runway montage, which comes closest to making a strong statement. Any other narrative threads or statements are as graspable as wet spaghetti.

The name of Bonello’s game is abstraction and refraction. The film feels like following the smirking specter of Saint Laurent through a maze of mirrors (like the one in Enter the Dragon) while tripping on a cocktail of opiates. His image is swirling all around you, and it’s an intoxicating thing. After 150 minutes of this, though, you get queasy, and all you want to do is get out of the stinking maze and go home. Saint Laurent is often frustrating, tedious, and ultimately doesn’t say all that much about the guy. But there are fleeting moments when you do feel absorbed in Saint Laurent’s psyche, and in these moments the film is one hell of a drug.

Ulliel’s greatest gift to Saint Laurent is that his performance is the only thing that feels bolted to the ground in a film that feels narcotized beyond all recognition. He’s like a possessed sex demon inhaling his fill of hedonism wherever he goes. A lot of the film resembles those trashy fall-from-grace rock ‘n’ roll biopics where the rock star gets lost in a whirlwind of sex and drugs, but Ulliel elevates the material by accentuating Saint Laurent’s more sinister, predatory side. (There’s no better example of this than the creepy final shot, in which Ulliel stares down the camera, a Cheshire Cat grin creeping across his face.) Otherwise, the film is pretty formless. It moves and sways and slips out of your fingers like a puff of smoke. That can be a beautiful thing in small doses, but at 150 minutes Saint Laurent feels like a chore.

Mr. Holmes

Ian McKellen and director Bill Condon collaborate for the first time since 1998’s Gods and Monsters to offer their talents to the long-running Sherlock Holmes franchise with Mr. Holmes. McKellen plays the detective at an advanced age facing his greatest enemy of all: time. Resigned to a countryside cottage where a housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her aspiring sleuth son (Milo Parker), Holmes looks back on his life as his mind—his greatest treasure—begins to fade. He can only remember fragments of an unsolved case involving a mysterious woman, which haunts him every day.

Split into three narrative threads, Mr. Holmes is the cinematic equivalent of a juicy page-turner (it’s based on a 2005 novel by Mitch Cullin). Condon darts from mystery to the another moments before we uncover a tantalizing clue, resulting in a terrific sense of narrative propulsion one wouldn’t expect to find in a movie about such meditative subject matter. It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing an elderly Mr. Holmes once you’ve seen McKellen work, which is no big surprise; what it a surprise is how close Linney and Parker come to stealing the show.

Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine

Coming off the controversial success of Going Clear, Alex Gibney and his research and production machine dissect the career of Steve Jobs, a man whose work people fell in love with, but whose temperament was often notoriously nasty. Delving into the private life of the deceased visionary as he built what would become the great tech empire of the century, the film thoroughly outlines Jobs’ accomplishments and influence, mostly to set the stage for its real goal. Jobs’ unsavory, vaguely monstrous approach to both his personal relationships and business dealings have been well documented before, but Gibney and his team explore the disagreeable side of Jobs’ character more comprehensively than any other piece of media to date.

The issue with the film is its scope: It simply tries to cover too many topics and dates and pivotal events and facets of Jobs as a man. Information piles up so quickly that by the end of the film I was struggling to remember what happened in the first half. The more incisive final act of the film, which exposes controversies like Apple’s employee-less foreign operations company in Ireland (where income taxes are more manageable than in the states), is the highlight, and a film more focused on these kind of indictments may have been more intriguing.

Saint Laurent

In Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance) casts Gaspard Ulliel as Yves Saint Laurent to explore the French designer’s peak years, from 1967 to 1976. If it were acceptable to issue difficulty levels to movies, I’d give this one a nine: its plot is about as graspable as a puddle of spilt champagne. What we see is essentially a free-form sequence of moments, whose significance is often more than elusive. Cinematically, though, almost everything looks interesting, if not flat-out brilliant. The colors pop, the costumes are breathtaking, and the staging is off-putting, in a way. A notable moment when Ulliel smiles directly into the camera, for instance, sends chills down your spine.

The movie’s length (150 minutes) is, by far, the biggest barrier to entry. Bonello is in super-stylized, artsy mode throughout, and that means some sections are glacial and abstract and only pay dividends after you’ve left the theater; whether or not this is a good thing depends entirely on your taste. As a portrait of a man, Saint Laurent is surprisingly unflattering, and that’s a good thing, an eschewing of the hagiography cliché.

Yves Saint Laurent changed the face of fashion on numerous occasions, innovating through design, expanding the horizons of the art form like few else in the 20th century. Alas, Jalil Lespert’s tribute to the man, Yves Saint Laurent, finds itself constricted by boundaries the man it pays tribute to would have broken through. It’s got all the biopic trappings that make us groan, following the same formula that stunts 90 percent of entries in the genre, keeping them from achieving true artistry. It’s that terrible biopic irony in which filmmaker tries so hard to faithfully represent their subject’s life events, achievements, and relationships that they forget to do the one thing that would truly do them justice: Make a great movie.

Lespert focuses on Saint Laurent’s career, following the designer from his early years as artistic director of House of Dior at age 21, to his later years, when he became plagued by mental and physical illness as a result of years of substance abuse. Pierre Niney stars and fits the role of the lanky, angular-faced Saint Laurent nicely. His gradual physical transformation over the course of the film is handled well by the makeup crew, and his increasingly fidgety mannerisms and evolving anxiety meet the same standard of quality, portraying the legendary figure’s mental deterioration with respect without glossing it up (much of what we see is unflattering).

At first, Saint Laurent is a shy, unassuming boy wonder with a warm personality working in Paris. He debuts with an inspired line of clothing that garners him loads of adulation, along with which come responsibilities he has no time or patience for. The pressures of heading up the world’s biggest fashion house begin to chip away at him as he breaks into random fits of rage. The breaking point comes when Saint Laurent is drafted to the French army, prompting a mental breakdown that would mark the beginning of his steep descent into manic depression.

The film is narrated by his business partner and lover, Pierre Bergé (Guillaume Gallienne), speaking to Saint Laurent in their advanced years. While the voiceovers are nice bookends to the story (the film’s tragic final shots are particularly heartbreaking), they do little to enhance or illuminate everything in between. Bergé and Saint Laurent’s sometimes wildly sexual, sometimes wildly combative relationship is threatened several times by pretty boys Saint Laurent meets at coke parties, and more interestingly by his muse, Victoire Doutreleau (Charlotte Le Bon), who has a quick fling with Bergé. These romantic interludes only serve to sidetrack the film, offering little insight into our subject’s state of mind.

Niney embodies Saint Laurent with an anxious rage while exuding the flare of a true fashion pioneer. Almost bird-like in appearance, he slinks through his environment, timid, and yet ready to burst with fury at any second. It’s a finely constructed physical performance, but the material gives Niney little emotional depth to explore. The film views Saint Laurent from a distance, and we never feel as though we’re invited into his head. This is exacerbated by Bergé’s narration, which rears its ugly head every time we begin to feel a sense of intimacy and immediacy.

If nothing else, Lespert’s crafted an incredibly slick-looking film. The period costumes are visions of beauty, particularly the Mondrian dresses Saint Laurent was so famous for. The fashion show sequences will likely make fans of YSL weep. The film’s third act focuses too keenly on drug abuse, amplifying the tragedy of Saint Laurent’s addiction while failing to explore his inner turmoil. Yves Saint Laurent is a formulaic “fallen genius” film that represents its influential subject and the fashion industry respectfully, but it would have been a better film had it just dug a little deeper.

Yves Saint Laurent trailer