Seven November movies you should check out
Monitor film critic Peter Rainer was impressed by several movies that were released this month, including "Roma," Alfonso Cuaron's most personal film, and actor Willem Dafoe portraying Van Gogh.
‘At Eternity’s Gate’ features career-best Willem Dafoe
“I am my paintings,” says Vincent van Gogh, played by Willem Dafoe in a career-best performance, in Julian Schnabel’s “At Eternity’s Gate,” which follows the artist through his last tumultuous and astonishingly prolific years in the late 1880s in the south of France. Watching this explosively lyrical film, you can believe it.
Schnabel is, of course, a celebrated artist as well as a powerful, if powerfully uneven, filmmaker, and what he captures here is what it must have been like to Van Gogh. It’s an artist’s imagining of what another artist might have felt. He never does break away from the romantic, madness-of-genius cliché that has dogged so many movies and commentaries about Van Gogh. Instead, he embraces it because he believes it authenticates the turmoil that goes into creating great art. Of course, turmoil can also create bad art, but such is Schnabel’s ardor that rather than of his mental anguish.
