Review Summary

Twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol continues to exert a powerful, almost queasy fascination, not only because of his work — which has proven more durable and interesting than it may have seemed before — but also because of the enigma of his personality. He has become a recurrent figure in movies, documentary and otherwise, where he is often inscrutable and vaguely sinister, a watchful predator in relation to the young people who surrounded him in the 1960s Factory days. The idea of Warhol as a corrupter and destroyer of innocence was fairly overt in George Hickenlooper’s “Factory Girl,” which starred Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick, a well-born New Englander who appeared in some of Warhol’s films. The notion is implicit in “A Walk Into the Sea,” Esther B. Robinson’s documentary about Danny Williams, a former Harvard student who was also part of the Factory scene. Ms. Robinson, who is Mr. Williams’s niece, does a pretty good job of reconstructing the creative and psychological whirlwind around Warhol, but the film, one suspects by accident as much as by design, feels tentative and unfinished, the incomplete pursuit of suspected secrets that remain undisclosed. — A. O. Scott, The New York Times