Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Kirpianuscus the films of our childhood have a special aura. each is great ignoring the artistic virtues. because they are part from us. from memories, emotions, representations, dreams. in this case , for me, all has the virtues of magic. the great performance of Kirk Douglas. the impressive work of Anthony Quin. the admirable way to translate on screen the book of few generation of Vicente Minelli. sure, it is a slice from a period. sure, it is far to be example of biographic accuracy. but it gives a realistic, sensitive, maybe useful portrait of a great artist. or, maybe, revolutionary. and this is its huge virtue. to discover on the screen models and the air of XIX century. to meet names and characters. to be pushed to discover the real van Gogh. and to be front to a magnificent Gauguin. so, an admirable film. for its artistic virtues. but, maybe, first, for its status of film of my childhood.

Prismark10 Director Vincente Minnelli has made an art film. It is evident from the way he has used his colour palette and light when shooting the film. Cold greys with the early mining village scenes, reds for glimpses of Paris turning to greens in the countryside of Provence and for the fields of Arles we see yellows.In turn scenes and characters would reflect his famous works of arts even the sets such as his room in Arles. We have images of Van Gogh painting the night sky with candles on his hat so he can see better in the dark.Kirk Douglas immerses himself as Van Gogh becoming a preacher in a small mining town and decides he needs to really live amongst the dirt than be a pious preacher. He is miserable but passionate, after his widowed cousin turns down his advances, he becomes more miserable but also turns towards art. Initially he sketches and with the aid of his cousin, he turns to painting and colours.Over time there is desperation, his brother Theo provides him with money but cannot sell his works. His paintings go against fashion of the times, it is mocked. Only Paul Gaugin (Anthony Quinn) understands but when Gaugin goes on to stay with him they have an artistically wild relationship where they also irritate each other.In the end Van Gogh succumbs to mental illness. Douglas gives generally a subtle performance but underneath there is passion, for life, for art, for love but also hurt, the hurt he felt from failure in love, his life and his art which did not sell.Van Gogh would fall out with people, whether they were friends, family or lovers. Even Gaugin could not stand the whining from Van Gogh or the pigsty of the house he was staying in. Quinn gives a brash, animalistic performance, his short cameo won him a best supporting actor Oscar and he also bagged some nice lines.Lust for Life is an effective melodrama, maybe it does not always adhere to the truth but presents Van Gogh as lonely, vulnerable, haunted figure while Minnelli adds an artist's eye and a visual style which is helped by shooting in locations that Van Gogh lived in rather than a Hollywood backlot.

tieman64 Few artists embody the "tortured artist archetype" as fully as Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Born in 1853, Vincent was traumatically named after a brother who died one year prior to his own birth. A moody child, he'd hoped to become a Christian minister, but several failed romances, and his growing disillusionment with the church, set him upon a different path. He'd become a painter instead, and quickly become preoccupied with sketching the plights of the lower classes. For Vincent, the poor and the downtrodden came to represent a certain "truth". He empathised with their suffering, identified with their despair, and saw divinity in their lives, squalid homes and craggy faces.Vincent's career would last about ten years. Much of this time was spent in poverty, depression and isolation. Occasionally he'd hang out with prostitutes and fellow painters, but they did little to stave off the suicidal thoughts festering in his brain. Despite his unhappiness, Vincent worked at a feverish pace. He'd produce thousands of sketches and over 800 paintings, his work slowly transitioning from social realism to vibrant post-impressionism. Much of this work was done in Arles, in the South of France, where Vincent would famously chop off his ear. Afterwards he'd spend a year in a mental asylum, where he suffered a series of mental breakdowns. His last completed paintings would portray ominous wheat fields. Writing of these paintings, Vincent would say: "they depict vast, distended fields under angry skies, and I did not have to go out of my way very much in order to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness." He would die days later, after fatally shooting himself in the chest. Vincente Minnelli directed "Some Came Running" in 1958 and "The Sandpiper" in 1965. Both films find artists refusing to be absorbed by a culture or society they deem to be conformist, staid or offensive. Mocked for dedicating their lives to vague artistic calls, and pushed to the margins of society, Minnelli's artists quickly find themselves on suicidal or self-destructive paths.Released in 1956, Minnelli's "Lust for Life" tells a similar tale. It stars Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh, and touches upon all the now famous cornerstones of van Gogh's life. Whilst not as great a film as Robert Altman's similarly themed "Vincent and Theo", Minnelli's film nevertheless offers a good example of 1950s, big studio, auteurist melodrama. Minnelli's film is grand, voluptuous, every emotion and gesture ridiculously larger than life, every frame bursting with strange colours. More interestingly, Minnelli fills his picture with subtle references to countless van Gogh paintings, figures and compositions. Elsewhere he throws in clever references to other prominent painters, like one scene in which we see George Seurat painting his 1884 masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte". The marvellous Anthony Quinn costars as post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, another painter who rose to prominence only after his death.Minnelli has too many films about artists to list. A subset of these films, though, seem preoccupied with "tortured artists" ("Lust for Life", "The Cobweb", "Two Weeks in Another Town", "Some Came Running", "The Sandpiper") who seem incompatible with the outside world. A large chunk of Minnelli's filmography is itself "about" the problems individuals face – sometimes linked to gender issues - fitting in with crowds. Minnelli was himself a gay man, but most biographies portray him as an openly and proudly homosexual artist who rose, seemingly effortlessly, above the problems faced by the tortured artists of his films.8/10 – See "Art School Confidential", "Young Man with a Horn", "In a Lonely Place", "The Devil and Daniel Johnston" and "Vincent and Theo".

edwagreen The brightness of the sunflowers, a masterpiece by Van Gogh. Unfortunately, his life wasn't anywhere as bright. Emotionally conflicted in a life where he felt he could not achieve, Van Gogh was certainly doomed as a man of tragedy.Such is the material that Kirk Douglas had to work with in portraying this master painter. Douglas turned in a riveting, memorable, totally brilliant performance and in this writer's estimation, he was totally robbed of the Academy Award for best actor in 1956. Yul Brynner's win for "The King and I," was shocking to say the least. It was bad enough that Heston and Brynner were denied best actor nominations for "The 10 Commandments" that year, but Douglas losing brought a bitter taste to a film goer's mouth.On the other hand, Anthony Quinn was the surprising winner for best supporting actor in his brief stint as the selfish Paul Gaugin.(Robert Stack-"Written on the Wind!")You feel the pain that Douglas portrayed in this film. It will be etched in our memories for ever. A crowning achievement of epic proportions. They don't get much better than this.