Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh
The best film about Vincent Van Gogh is not one of the many biopics of the painter, but this stirring, ardent documentary. Forgoing a conventional biography's and-then-he-cut-his-ear-off approach, the gifted Dutch-Australian director Paul Cox opts for pure evocation:  he trails his camera through the places where Van Gogh walked, as though trying to dream his way into the artist's mindset. Meanwhile, the beautiful voice of John Hurt reads from Vincent's amazingly searching letters to his brother, Theo. (Hurt's voice probably deserved an Oscar for this vocal-cord performance alone.) Van Gogh's journey as struggling artist and tormented man of soul is thus made strangely direct--it will not only send you to see Vincent's paintings but to locate a copy of his collected letters as well. Many film directors have grappled with this subject:  Vincente Minnelli withLust for Life, Robert Altman withVincent & Theo, Maurice Pialat withVan Gogh. But the perpetually underappreciated Cox (Innocence) has trumped them with simplicity and sheer intensity of feeling.--Robert Horton