Taking its cue from Salma Hayek’s title performance, this movie biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is as committed and reverent as you’d expect, dutifully checking off her life’s major events. The only freshness comes from the striking visual strokes of director Julie Taymor, who either recreates Kahlo’s self-portraits on the screen or ingeniously alludes to them, as when an early trolley crash echoes the fractured beauty of Kahlo’s Suicide of Dorothy Hale.
