Vincent van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing review – a painting-by-numbers portrait

Presumably commissioned to coincide roughly with the recent rehang at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this solem but crushingly responsible and dull documentary explores the life and art of Vincent van Gogh. A predictable mix of talking heads, voiceover narration, rostrum shots of paintings and letters, and bits with a strikingly well-cast actor playing Van Gogh are spliced together. Doggedly chronological, it moves from his humble bourgeois origins to the productive years in France, where he struggled with what sounds a lot like bipolar disorder. As a primer for those who know next to nothing about him, or the more informed who’d like a brush up, this is an eminently serviceable work, albeit one that really doesn’t need to be seen in a cinema. If nothing else, you’ll come away knowing how Dutch people actually pronounce his name, with that unvoiced “H” at the beginning and a guttural growl at the end.