Film

Loving Vincent

Name: Loving Vincent
Genre: Animation, Drama, History
Released: 2017
Cast: Douglas Booth, Robert Gulaczyk, Eleanor Tomlinson, Helen McCrory, Saoirse Ronan

Biopic

Loving Vincent is the first fully oil-painted animated feature, its 65,000 frames hand-painted by over a hundred artists working in Van Gogh's own style. A postman's son investigates the painter's final days through the townspeople who knew him. It's less biopic than moving gallery — hypnotic, mournful, gorgeous to look at, and best suited to anyone who wants to watch a painting breathe rather than race through a plot.

TMDb rating

4.0

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love painting-as-filmmaking, where every frame is a canvas brushed in the style of its subject, and you don't mind a gentle detective hunt over a hard plot.

Skip it if you want fast cutting or a brisk plot, since this moves at the pace of a slow stroll and its mystery is more mood than momentum.

What it asks of you: Ninety-five minutes of hand-painted frames, paced like a long afternoon; the image carries more than the dialogue, so you have to lean in.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

At Eternity's Gate2018

Willem Dafoe's fevered, Oscar-nominated performance puts you inside Van Gogh's own perception — shaky, luminous, obsessive — the closest an ordinary camera has come to painted vision.

But Impressionistic and meandering by design, with barely any plot — frustrating if you wanted the investigative structure Loving Vincent gave you.

Mr. Turner2014

Mike Leigh's biopic of J.M.W. Turner treats genius as a daily grind rather than tragic myth — grumpy, tactile, gorgeously lit, with Timothy Spall grunting his way to greatness.

But Slow and unsentimental across 150 minutes of very British reticence — don't expect catharsis or clean emotional beats.

Frida2002

Salma Hayek anchors this vivid, stylised life of Frida Kahlo, using surrealist visual flourishes to fuse art and biography the way Loving Vincent fuses painting and story.

But Leans on more conventional biopic beats than you might want, and the visual daring occasionally tips into melodrama.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Loving Vincent

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Waltz with Bashir2008

Another animated investigation into a death nobody wants to fully remember, using unconventional animation to make memory strange and unstable rather than comforting.

An Israeli filmmaker uses stark, hallucinatory rotoscoped animation to dig into his own suppressed memories of a 1982 wartime massacre — animation deployed for horror rather than beauty.

But Bleak, adult war material that's genuinely upsetting — nothing like the gentle melancholy of Loving Vincent's palette.

Pollock2000

Ed Harris directs and stars as Jackson Pollock, chronicling the toll of a singular creative obsession with genuine physical commitment to the paint-splattered process.

But Dour and claustrophobic in its focus on addiction and marital collapse, with little of Loving Vincent's visual wonder.

Big Eyes2014

Tim Burton's tale of art fraud and stolen credit is lighter, weirder and stranger than it sounds, with Amy Adams terrific as the wronged painter.

But Its true-crime irony plays broader and campier than the hushed reverence Loving Vincent brings to its subject.

Girl with a Pearl Earring2003

A quiet, painterly film about the tension between an artist and his muse, gorgeously lit until it practically looks like a Vermeer come to life.

But Very slow and repressed — a chamber piece, with far less overt drama than a death investigation.

Basquiat1996

Julian Schnabel, himself a painter, directed this eulogy for Jean-Michel Basquiat, sharing the same outsider curiosity about a doomed genius's final years.

But Jeffrey Wright is superb, but the downtown-80s milieu and drug-fuelled tragedy feel worlds from provincial 1890s France.

Amadeus1984

A rival's jealous, unreliable account of Mozart's decline gives you the same pleasure Loving Vincent does — piecing a genius's death together through gossip and resentment.

But Broader, funnier and more theatrical than anything in Loving Vincent's hushed palette — this is an opera, not a eulogy.

Vincent & Theo1990

Robert Altman's take on Van Gogh focuses on the fraught bond with his devoted brother, a quieter companion piece filling in the family history behind the letters.

But Slower and more clinical than Loving Vincent, with Tim Roth's prickly performance keeping sentiment at arm's length.

Rashomon1950

Structurally, this is Loving Vincent's ancestor — a death investigated through multiple witnesses whose accounts contradict each other, leaving certainty permanently out of reach.

Kurosawa's classic uses four irreconcilable versions of one crime to ask whether truth is even recoverable — the same puzzle-box device driving the postman's investigation.

But A Japanese period drama built on courtroom-style testimony; the samurai setting is a world away from rural France.

Lust for Life1956

The original Hollywood attempt to paint this exact life on screen — same subject, six decades earlier, before anyone thought to tell it in oil paint itself.

Kirk Douglas gives a ferocious, Oscar-nominated performance as Van Gogh in vivid Technicolor, made when Hollywood believed prestige biopics needed movie stars, not brushstrokes.

But Melodramatic and stagey by modern standards, with none of Loving Vincent's formal daring — a straight, old-fashioned tearjerker.