Let's be realistic.

good back-story, and good acting

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Frankie (Halle Berry) is a stripper with multiple personality disorder in 1970s. After an incident, she seeks help from Dr. Oz (Stellan Skarsgård). She lives with her mother Edna Murdoch (Phylicia Rashad) and sister Maxine (Chandra Wilson). She is haunted by memories and forgotten traumas. She disrupts Paige Prescott's wedding and gets thrown in jail. She gets Dr. Oz to evaluate her. She starts to remember her work as the Prescotts' maid and an illicit affair with Paige's brother.This is built for Halle Berry to do some acting work but it isn't much more than that. The secret memories aren't that compelling. It becomes one acting scene from Halle to another. There is an intriguing white racist personality which digs a little deeper and is something different. The story has no drive and no tension.

Review: I quite enjoyed this interesting movie about a woman who has multiple personalities. One minute she's a stripper in a club who takes drugs and enjoys partying, then the next minute she is a intelligent Southern woman whose a white racist, even though she is black. She also has another personality called Genius whose a 7 year old girl, but she doesn't know how to control her alter egos so she seeks help from a psychotherapist who is interested in her case. As the movie is based around the 70's, they didn't have the different methods of dealing with this kind of illness so a lot of people just put it down to her being crazy. It didn't help that her main personality, Frankie, was a party animal and she smoked dope, but when she finally faces her problems, with the help of her doctor, they finally work out that her many personalities are down to an episode in her past. I honestly wasn't expecting that much from this movie because I hadn't heard of it before and Hall Berry hasn't really made anything that promising lately, but it's very well written and the fact that it's based on true events makes the concept interesting. The acting is top form from Hallen Berry and the chemistry between doctor and patient is brilliant. I did have a problem with the way that Berry switched into her different personalities because it seemed to happened out of the blue, but that's just me being picky. Anyway, I personally think that it deserved more money at the box office because of the effort that was put it from the actors and the emotional storyline. Watchable!Round-Up: Halle Berry got hit with the Oscar bug, by coming out with a lot of dud movies after she had received her award. From the strange Cloud Atlas and the terrible Dark Tide and Catwoman, her career has been really gone downhill lately. Her saving grace has to be the role as Storm in the X-Men movies and she has now turned to TV with the series Extant which has got mixed reviews. At the age of 48, she still looks great but she really has to think before she picks her next roles. Stellan Skarsgard seems to be making the right choices as the professor in the Avengers and Thor franchise and he has also put in great performances in the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and the Nyphomaniac movies. Together they both worked well in this film but its another one of those movies that didn't get a big cash injection from the studio. Budget: N/A Worldwide Gross: $700,000I recommend this movie to people who are into their deep dramas about a woman who suffers with multiple personalities and seeks help from a psychotherapist. 6/10

I did not realize that Frankie and Alice was a 2010 film until I looked it up at IMDb. Although, I did notice while viewing the film that Halle looked incredible and youthful as the lead character in the title role of Frankie. This is the second time that Ms. Berry has been on screen as an exotic dancer, she was less memorable in that short lived role in The Last Boyscout. Frankie Murdock (Halle Berry) comes across as someone who knows what she has to do to survive her circumstances how to pick a mark to get paid and even hands out vocational advice to coworkers. We find out however, through her erratic behavior it is revealed that she is not as well put together as she first seems. I knew from the trailer that the film dealt with multiple personality disorder or whatever is the current clinical name for split personalities, so the film The Three Faces of Eve came to mind as I attentively watched the story unfold. Through a series of flashbacks we see Frankie as a child and a young woman and eventually learn and understand the root of her mental illness as she undergoes treatment with Dr. Oz (Stellan Skarsgard). I would love to see Mr. Skarsgard step outside of his character, he has this Zoolander approach to acting, no matter what persona he is portraying it's always the same look. Ms. Berry on the other hand was on point she was emotionally engaging, showing a range that was both compelling and evoked compassion for what her character had endured. Her personality was splintered; her experiences caused her coping mechanisms into overdrive. Halle Berry proves that the title of 'Oscar winner' is well deserved. She played the role very convincingly with Oz and against the other key characters in the film her mother Edna (Phylicia Rashad) and her sister Maxine (Miranda Bailey oops, I mean Chandra Wilson). I enjoyed this story because it was interesting and not a new construct, it was nice to see the bad guy in the usual places, but to find a completely unexpected bad guy in this film was bittersweet. The first half hour or so became a bit annoying with all the jumping around, but not enough to reduce the entertainment value.

As one who lives with Dissociative Identity Disorder, I found the film engaging, honest and true to life. I did find it interesting that Dr. Oz refers to Frankie as having Dissociative Identity Disorder--since that name for the disorder was not around in the 1970s. Halle Berry portrays someone with a mental health issue in a convincing way--and portrays the issues of living with DID very well. The movie is well written and cast. My only complaint was that there was too little time spent showing genius...who is her helping alter. I know mine was out a lot more than I was before I became aware of the alters. It took Berry years to get this project out, sadly the release even now is very limited. It would go a long way toward helping others understand this disorder.