Synopsis
Famed but tormented artist Vincent van Gogh spends his final years in Arles, France, painting masterworks of the natural world that surrounds him.
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Cast
- Willem DafoeVincent van Gogh
- Rupert FriendTheo van Gogh
- Oscar IsaacPaul Gauguin
- Mads MikkelsenThe Priest
- Mathieu AmalricDr. Paul Gachet
- Emmanuelle SeignerMadame Ginoux
- Niels ArestrupMadman
- Anne ConsignyTeacher
- Amira CasarJohanna van Gogh-Bonger
- Vincent PerezThe Director
- 91
IndieWire
Schnabel fuses form and content in a way that’s rarely attempted and even more rarely achieved; in risking the same derision with which Van Gogh was sometimes met, he transcends the limitations of the conventional biopic and creates something that feels genuinely new. - 90
Variety
Schnabel, the director of “Before Night Falls” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has stripped down his filmmaking in the most seductive way, all to achieve something audacious and elemental. He’s out to imagine what Vincent van Gogh was really like — to bask in van Gogh’s presence with an experiential, present-tense immediacy. - 85
TheWrap
Schnabel creates a natural, immersive motion picture that conveys the experience of being, living with, and painting like Vincent Van Gogh. - 83
The Film Stage
At Eternity’s Gate is a film made by an artist (“plates painter” Schnabel) less concerned with a painter, more with the way a painter saw the world. In its rupture from traditional biographical narratives, it does not merely stand out as unconventional biopic–it also comes close to resuscitating the idea of cinema as moving pictures. - 80
Time
Schnabel’s dream portrait of van Gogh is made whole by its star, Willem Dafoe, whose radiant intensity fills every corner of the film. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
This is in many ways an abrasive, wildly uneven film — raw and deliberately unvarnished in style, shot by Benoit Delhomme with a nervous handheld camera and lots of wide-angle lenses that mirror the darting restlessness and the uneasy perspective of a troubled mind. - 60
The Guardian
Julian Schnabel has made a heartfelt if straightforwardly reverent film about the last years in the life of Vincent van Gogh – acted by with all the integrity and unselfconscious ease that you would expect from this great actor. - 60
Screen Daily
Despite a strong, affecting performance by Willem Dafoe – who, even more than Kirk Douglas or Pialat’s star Jacques Dutronc, looks born to the part – the director’s pugnacious visual and editing style never impart the kinetic emotional charge of his 2007 drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.