Metrograph

The harried final years of Vincent van Gogh’s life receive a treatment that approximates the ravishing urgency of his painting in Schnabel’s richly textured, highly original biopic, in which Willem Dafoe depicts the painter as he struggles with his deteriorating mental health, his religious convictions, and his fraught friendship with Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac). Dafoe, doing some of the finest work of his career, gives us van Gogh as a blazing pier of passions and contradictions in Schnabel’s immersive and enormously inventive film, a study of total artistic conviction and the perilous isolation that comes along with it.

Post-screening Q&A with Willem Dafoe on Thursday, December 7th