The current cinema, art history edition

The daily grind: Tim Jenison learns to make pig­ments pri­or to attempt­ing a Vermeer.

Tim’s Vermeer reviewed for RogerEbert.com; Brightest Star reviewed for same. One’s good and inter­est­ing, the oth­er not so much. 

While I note, with bemuse­ment, that a com­menter below has taken me to task for some “same-old same-old” crit­ic bash­ing, and hence I ought to be more maybe more cir­cum­spect before mak­ing note of this, but hey, YOLO and all that: I was a little sur­prised that my friend Manohla Dargis took such a hos­tile tack against Tim’s Vermeer in her review of the movie in the Times today, express­ing, in her cus­tom­ary vivid and vig­or­ous lan­guage, a real dis­taste with pretty much all of the people respons­ible. I cite this not to take Dargis to task, but merely because the movie she describes is pretty much the movie I was dread­ing before I saw Tim’s Vermeer at the New York Film Festival. I thought the actu­al film sidestepped glib reduc­tion­ism and offered fas­cin­at­ing case­work detail (while also, less for­tu­nately but not fatally, sidestep­ping a lot of aes­thet­ic ind philo­soph­ic­al implic­a­tions). Manohla makes a case, though, and in a lively way. See the movie and decide for your­self, as they say.