Rereleased as a tribute to its director, who died earlier this year, and its subject, who was born 150 years ago, Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh has two things in its favour: an intelligent central performance from Jacques Dutronc, and a running-time long enough to settle us into the casual rhythms of the painter's last months.
What it doesn't have, however, is a way of showing us the world through the eyes of its central character. Pialat lays great emphasis on the iconoclasm of Van Gogh's art - we see him dismissing a Renoir without a second look - but the director's own taste is for the kind of fuzzy, sentimental images against which his hero was kicking.
Van Gogh
Cert: 12A
