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For Willem Dafoe, star of Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, performing is akin to painting. Studying the latter craft under the painter-director, for his portrait of Vincent Van Gogh, Dafoe recognized that each art form is “an accumulation of marks,” coalescing over time to produce a remarkable effect. “They start to sing to each other, to vibrate. They start to create a rhythm. They start to create a life,” the actor says. “Something starts to happen—play of colors, play of shapes—but it starts out with marks. With an accumulation, they start to move, and something is born.”

With regard to cinema, the three-time Oscar nominee observes a dissonance. As alive as films are—as eternal as they feel—the process of making them sometimes feels akin to death. “After a while, this stuff takes off,” he says. “It’s almost like you aren’t there anymore.

Vincent Van Gogh died at 37; Willem Dafoe is 61. Despite that age gap, Dafoe portrays the seminal artist with a physical and spiritual power not unlike his transcendent portrayal of Jesus in “The Last Temptation of Christ.” It marks a career best, and could land him his second acting Oscar nomination in a row, after last year’s “The Florida Project.” (He was also nominated for supporting roles in “Platoon” and “Shadow of the Vampire.”)

“At Eternity’s Gate” director Julian Schnabel, who has been Dafoe’s friend for 30 years, dismissed the idea that the actor was too old for the role: He said Dafoe was in better shape now than Van Gogh was at his death.

“What he did is something I could not imagine,” Schnabel said at an intimate CBS Films awards brunch November 4, with a Q&A moderated by Guillermo Del Toro. “I didn’t want to make...

The artist’s last days appear in swirling, scintillating animated frames – it’s an impressive but weirdly exasperating exercise in style

Here is an oddity: intriguing and yet weirdly exasperating, like a sentimental tribute, or a one-joke epic, or a monomaniacal act of stylistic pedantry.

It’s an animation imagining the last months of Vincent van Gogh’s life, and specifically (but inconclusively) investigating the theory first aired in the 2011 biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White, that he did not shoot himself but was actually shot as a bizarre prank by a local bully, one René Secrétan, a 16-year-old who was tormenting poor Vincent and loved to swagger round the fields in a cowboy costume carrying a pistol. So on his deathbed Van Gogh claimed he had killed himself, perhaps out of weary despair, or a desire not to make posthumous trouble for the neighbourhood, or perhaps simply to...

The art world hasn't had this much excitement since Marina Abramovic filled the MoMa with dozens of real-live naked ladies. A new book, which popped up for the first time last night on 60 Minutes, claims that Vincent Van Gogh did not actually commit suicide, as everyone has believed for the last 120 years, but rather was shot by a group of local children.  The theory was proposed by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith in their new book, Vincent Van Gogh: A Life. A few days before his death, Vincent staggered up to the inn where he lived with a bullet wound in his stomach. (He eventually died from it, after a few days in the hospital.) According to the book, doctors noted that the bullet seemed to have been shot from a gun a good distance from the artist's body, and when the police asked him if [...]...