As with Arianna Huffington's bio, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, on which Surviving Picasso is based, you'll learn much less here about Picasso the visionary than about Picasso the debaucher. Seen through the eyes of Françoise Gilot (newcomer Natascha McIlhone), the only lover who dumped the artist before he could dump her, Picasso is a charming, vain reprobate who juggles women and obsequious art dealers with equal self-assurance. In another memorable, witty contribution to his rogues' gallery, Anthony Hopkins plays Picasso as a libertine whose ego is kept in check only by the equally willful Françoise, his own decrepitude, his respect for his peer Matisse (a serene Joss Ackland), and the filmmakers' customary tastefulness. Like many Merchant/Ivory movies, Picasso isn't nearly boisterous enough and has a seventh-inning-stretch problem. Still it's a pleasure to watch Hopkins frolic, as if genius and corruption were both just appetites as basic and insatiable as breathing and eating. At the Nickelodeon and the Kendall Square.