Why do people make tremulous films about artists? It’s a question I was close to screaming when I exited James Lucas’s film of the brief encounter between the supermodel Kate Moss and the super-duper painter Lucian Freud in the coke-stoked naughty Noughties. Moss & Freud is well short of being the worst example of this failed genre. The bar here is spectacularly low and this toe-curler has some way to go before it reaches the pits of Frida, Salma Hayek’s stupendously silly telling of the story of Frida Kahlo, or Pollock, Ed Harris’s pool of perspiration masquerading as a film about Jackson Pollock. This is too much of a short story to fall to such Hadean depths. Because it is essentially her side of the story, we spend more time than we should at wild S&M parties in Berlin and keep flashing back to her days of teenage innocence. Baked into the fabric of the artistic biopic—any artistic biopic—is the unbreakable truth that any attempt to mimic an artist’s art will look unconvincing. Lucas tries his best to minimize the damage by filming Freud’s work as obliquely as possible. But things go really wrong when the painting is finally finished and the fully pregnant Moss arrives to see it. When the big denouement comes, what gets revealed is a distant reproduction of Freud’s original. Any air the film had left comes seeping out. —Waldemar Januszczak