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The film’s beauty, its feel for painting, its emotional intensity, Dafoe’s soul-searching performance—none of these are new to the Van Gogh genre. But like Joan of Arc movies, new Van Gogh films must come out. That’s because it becomes stranger, the farther we get from the lives of the Post-Impressionists, to see once again the crimped way people hated Van Gogh’s paintings in their time.

Schnabel’s film is admirably preoccupied with light and texture and the experience of an artist’s work, though the camera tricks prevent it from being at all immersive, making one yearn for the painterly reverence of Minnelli or the perverse borderlines of Pialat.

Willem Dafoe, as Schnabel’s Van Gogh, does not simply give a performance, he is the film’s _material_. The close identification of an actor with a film’s topic is part of the way that Schnabel encourages us to relate to Van Gogh. The effect he achieves is the opposite of the political divisiveness motivating Hollywood’s RBG agitprop.

Both [Roma and At Eternity’s Gate] wrest the sensuality of cinematic scale and soundscape back from its usual association with the Hollywood blockbuster.

The movie is caught between the filmmaker’s reverence for his subject and his attempt to flex his own artistic muscles. When cinematographer Benoît Delhomme floods the screen with sunflower-yellow light, it’s as much about impressing the audience as it is paying homage to van Gogh’s aesthetic.

[Van Gogh is] a man toiling every day at his craft, hoping that his medium will survive another century. Schnabel may share this hope. For the first time a director has tried to help cinemagoers share van Gogh’s gaze. To truly achieve this, however, a filmmaker may have to invent a new kind of cinema.

By adamantly focusing above all else on van Gogh’s work — and its transporting ecstasies — Schnabel has made not just an exquisite film but an argument for art.

The movie flips seemingly at random between French and English and, ludicrously, features actors impersonating, as if in Monty Python, familiar figures from the paintings, into which the actors are visually dubbed. These vulgar defacements of the art work match the eye-rollingly portentous melodrama with which van Gogh’s torments are depicted.

Schnabel’s dream portrait of van Gogh is made whole by its star, Willem Dafoe, whose radiant intensity fills every corner of the film.

Shivering like a nervous system on drugs, every frame stuns with conviction and immediacy. If avant-garde giant Stan Brakhage had made narrative movies, this is how they might have looked.

The film is so much a collaboration that I hesitate to designate it Schnabel’s alone. Together, Schnabel and Dafoe, who is in virtually every frame, have made the first convincing and illuminating non-documentary film about what great painters do and how they see, and for his efforts, Dafoe won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival.

I always like Willem Defoe, but he seems to be drifting through this movie, his emotions pitched closer to Dutronc than to Douglas. But he plays van Gogh like a simpleton, which he was not. He never achieves—or seems to seek out—the emotional intensity of the paintings themselves.